


In the Dark, I See Stars

by EvieFuller



Series: Half-Baked Ideas. [7]
Category: Lucifer (TV)
Genre: Amenadiel Messed Up, BAMF Chloe Decker, BAMF Lucifer Morningstar (Lucifer TV), BAMF Mazikeen (Lucifer TV), Brotherly Bonding, Chloe Decker is Not a Miracle, Escaped Hell Beasts, Eventual reveal, Hellhounds, Identity Reveal, Lightbringer Lucifer, Lord of Hell Lucifer Morningstar, Protective Lucifer Morningstar (Lucifer TV), Season 1 canon divergence, Wings
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-02-08
Updated: 2019-10-08
Packaged: 2019-10-24 08:08:31
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 13
Words: 45,694
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17700635
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/EvieFuller/pseuds/EvieFuller
Summary: Amenadiel’s actions have far more dire consequences than the mere fiasco that was Malcolm Graham. He messed with forces he didn’t fully understand, and when he left Hell with Malcolm’s soul, he left open a way for other things to follow him out. Lucifer is not pleased.I'm keeping this story in the "Half-Baked Ideas" series, but I do know exactly where I want to take it now. So this is no longer a "half-baked idea" so much as a work in progress:)





	1. The Disturbance

It took Lucifer a while to notice it, the disturbance. But well, he’d sealed away the vast majority of his power when he’d landed on the earthly plane, his severed wings the key to unlocking it. And then he’d gone and burned them in a fit of rage, making his power even harder to reach, so he figured he deserved a break for his lack of perception in this case. 

It was a bit embarrassing that it had taken Malcolm Graham literally showing up on his doorstep for him to notice, though. 

The formerly dead man (and yes, Lucifer could say with certainty that the insane human had in fact _died_ ) had practically glowed to Lucifer’s sight, like the Fires of Hell were still burning away at his fragile soul. It was no small wonder he was still capable of any level of functionality, crazy as the other humans would no doubt see him. 

At first, Lucifer had thought Malcolm himself was the source of the disturbance he was so suddenly sensing, but it became clear almost immediately that that wasn’t the case. The man was simply too…small to be the problem Lucifer could now feel. No, Malcolm had only opened the gate for something much more dangerous to slither through: Los Angeles, and maybe even the world as a whole, was about to have a much bigger problem than one traumatized mortal soul wreaking a bit of havoc. 

And so he’d sent the cop on his way with a pentecostal coin—little good that would do the human when the demons chased him down after he actually used it—and set to work figuring out what big bad had escaped Hell on Malcolm’s heels.

The process would have gone much quicker had he not had to deal with the minor inconvenience of being shot by that embezzling charity wife and the necessity of seeing her arrested. And, of course, that whole ordeal led to the revelation that it was the Detective making him vulnerable, so it was nearly sunrise before Lucifer managed to sequester himself away to meditate on the real problem. 

And a real problem it was.

“Dammit, Amenadiel,” Lucifer cursed as he pulled out of his trance. “What have you done?”

He strode towards the intercom by his elevator and called down to his demon’s floor, “Mazikeen…Mazikeen!”

“What?” her voice crackled back after a beat of impatient silence. 

“Come up here.”

“Why?”

“Come up here, Maze,” he commanded again without acknowledging her question. “Now.”

The line went dead and a few seconds later the elevator dinged, admitting a clearly sleep-rumpled and irritated woman. “Couldn’t this have waited, Lucifer?”

Lucifer waived her question away with a distracted motion of his hand, instead ordering, without offering any explanation, “I’m going to need that feather you took, Maze.”

“I…” the demon froze, suddenly on unsure ground. She should have known her lord would know about that feather. “May I ask why?”

He snorted, his opinion about needing to explain why he would want his own feather back obvious, but then he sighed, deciding to indulge her. “Malcolm Graham has caused a bit of a problem. Well, I guess Amenadiel is really to blame, but…”

“You need your wings back to deal with one damned soul?” Maze asked slowly, brows scrunched in confusion. 

“Of course not,” Lucifer rolled his eyes dramatically and poured out two full glasses of whiskey, sliding one over to Maze. “No, the problem, Maze, is that Malcolm is not an _escaped_ soul. He was _resurrected_. And Amenadiel, the daft seraphim, clearly had no idea what he was doing. It feels like he just bulldozed his way through Hell with no regard at all for the balance.”

Lucifer had not realized it was possible for his right-hand demon to pale so quickly.

“What escaped?” she asked with slow-dawning realization. 

“Hell Beasts,” he replied, expression set in a grim and uncharacteristically serious frown. “I can’t tell how many, but it could be as many as a hundred or more of the things. Hopefully less.”

“Shit. That’s not good.”

“Yes, thank you Maze, for that astute observation. Now if you could, please…the feather? Time moves rather more quickly in the infernal realm, and I’d like to get down there to stop the bleeding, if I could.”

Maze knocked back the remainder of her glass in one large gulp and spun on her heel, disappearing down the stairs and reappearing with a wooden box cradled in her hands before Lucifer had managed two more sips of his own drink. 

“Here,” she thrust the container at him as they both moved towards the leather couches in his living room. Rather than take it from her though, Lucifer instead started removing his shirt, tossing it over the back of a chair before he gracefully flopped facedown on the sofa.

“Put the feather on my back, right between the scars,” he directed. “And step back.”

Maze immediately complied.

Seconds after the feather touched his skin, it started to glow. Softly at first, and then with greater and greater intensity, until a mortal would have been blinded for looking at such brightness. As it was, the demon was forced to look away, but not before she saw two massive white wings beginning to solidify from the pure light.

Lucifer keened loudly, cutting himself off with little pain-filled whimpers every time the noises escaping his throat threatened to escalate into tortured screams. His entire body was a tense, quivering line as he fought to keep from thrashing around like a seizing mortal while he clawed at the cushions with a death grip that ripped the leather at the seams.

Finally, a short eternity later, the celestial light began to fade, taking the excruciating pain with it, but Lucifer just laid there for several long moments, panting. 

Maze crept forward, almost tiptoeing towards the Devil, and unceremoniously thrust a fresh glass of whiskey in the trembling archangel’s face.

He stared up at her, dazed, for half a second, before hauling himself into a sitting position and grabbing the tumbler. 

Liquor sloshed over the edge, dripping onto his bare chest as he brought the drink to his lips with a still-trembling hand. 

“Bloody Hell,” he grunted, draining his glass in one go and holding it out for a refill, “That was almost as bad as when you cut ‘em off in the first place!”

They were quiet for a moment as Lucifer stretched his newly regrown appendages. Then he reached deep within himself, feeling along the series of self-imposed locks that kept the majority of his power caged. In the physical realm, one of his wings curled around him, a sharp primary dragging down his chest, leaving a perfectly straight line of blood. And on the metaphysical plane, the restraints crumbled to dust. 

Lucifer breathed in light, relishing in the power that lit the stars. It swelled within him, realigning all his jagged edges, tingling along his nerves and making him whole once again. 

Maze sucked in an enraptured breath when Lucifer opened glowing Hell Fire eyes, for an instant turning the world around them into a burning inferno before earthly reality settled back over them and he appeared just an ordinary man sitting in a fancy living room, shining eyes and angelic wings tucked out of sight. 

“What do you need me to do?” she asked, even more eager now, after that display of power, to get back in her lord’s good graces than she had been the night before when she’d declared herself Lucifer’s inside man against Amenadiel. 

He gave her a considering look, debating whether or not he should take her with him to Hell before deciding against it. “Start tracking the Hell Beasts, numbers, locations. I want a priority list when I get back. And Mazikeen,” he said as he flared his wings, “should the Detective call, do let her know I’ll be back soon.” 

With that, Lucifer dove off the edge of his balcony and disappeared from the mortal plane. 

🔥✨🔥✨😈✨🔥✨🔥

He touched down in front of the main gate to Hell, grinning up at the massive Cerberus still loyally guarding this entrance. Malcolm and the Hell Beasts hadn’t escaped through this pathway then, not that Lucifer had really thought they’d come this way. But still, he was pleased to see his guardian unharmed.

The Cerberus towered above him, taller than a pine tree, and all three heads zeroed in on him, halting the procession of damned souls waiting to gain entrance to Hell and their own personal torture chambers. The middle head flicked out a forked tongue, tasting the essence of Lucifer’s soul while the other two heads leaned down to sniff at his physical form more directly. 

It barely took a second for the three-headed dog to recognize him as its master, and in the space of a breath it went from being a terrifying beast to deciding it was really just a big puppy, laying down on its back and whining for a tummy rub, giant tail banging against the gates with a spray of crushed stone as it wagged enthusiastically. 

Lucifer huffed a laugh and flew up to pet the silly creature’s stomach as requested. “Yes, yes, good boy,” he offered general praise as the dog wiggled happily below him for several minutes before eventually ordering, “Time to get back to work now, good boy.”

The Cerberus immediately rolled back onto his feet, growling at the crowd of clearly petrified mortal souls, much to Lucifer’s amusement. With a final scratch through thick silver fur, the archangel turned and flew through the gates, headed for the Pits which were located as far as possible (both physically and metaphysically) from the infinite rows of cells allocated for torturing the damned. 

Hell Beasts were…horrible creatures. Formed from a combination of excess energy from the realm of Hell itself and the insanity and pure destructive violence that bleeds from the especially despicable souls of damned mortals, they were purposeless monstrosities, and it took literal hordes of demons working round the clock to keep them contained in the Pits. It was delicate, dangerous work, work which couldn’t afford even the slightest of distractions. 

And Amenadiel’s ham-fisted resurrection of Malcolm had been nothing but distraction; Lucifer could still feel the imbalance running through the core of his realm, so he could only imagine what the place must have felt like as the seraphim bullied his way through Hell’s foundation. 

“My lord!” an exhausted demon exclaimed when he landed.

“Where is Bael?’ Lucifer asked, ignoring the kowtowing of the low-ranking demon before him. The demon pointed towards the watchtower at the far east of the Pits, and the Devil nodded his thanks before launching himself back into the air. 

“Lucifer!” Bael greeted him with a tired grin when he arrived, the easy familiarity in sharp contrast to the twenty or so other demons in the room who had all dropped to their knees in respect. 

“Bael,” he returned the greeting, bending down to kiss his trusted general and sometimes-lover’s cheek. It was too bad he didn’t have more time to indulge in the man while he was down here. Bael was an attractive demon, with his dark bronze skin and silken black hair; he had a face that intermittently shifted between that of a handsome, sharp-featured man and a viciously scarred cat. The sharp canine teeth, though, those were always present, and it was such a pleasure when the demon bit him _just so_. 

Lucifer sighed, shaking off his brief stab of lust to focus on the infinitely less enjoyable task of dealing with Amenadiel’s mess. “How many escaped?” he asked.

“It’s hard to say. We lost more than 300 demons during the escape. Almost everyone working the deep pits was obliterated.” Bael’s face shifted into its cat form as he spoke, barring his teeth in an angry hiss; Lucifer grit his teeth in response, impotent rage filling him. Damn Amenadiel. The stupid angel probably hadn’t spared two thoughts for the trouble his stunt would cause the demons of Hell, let alone the potential danger. Lucifer doubted it would even occur to Amenadiel to grieve for the lost demons, should he ever learn of their deaths. 

“Best estimate, though?” Bael continued after a moment of silence. “I’d say 97.”

“That escaped the Pits or that escaped Hell?”

“Hell,” Bael confirmed Lucifer’s fears. “More than 500 escaped the Pits before we could get a lid on it.”

Lucifer nodded in grim understanding. “But you’ve got the situation contained now? All the Hell Beasts still in Hell are back in the pits? And you’re not having trouble keeping them there?”

“It would help if you could repair rips in Hell’s foundation,” Bael stated, staring Lucifer straight in the eye. “Earth’s call is still strong, and it beckons those abominations.”

Lucifer nodded his head in easy agreement. The tears throwing Hell out of balance would self-correct in time, but they couldn’t really afford to wait given the current situation, and the Devil alone had the power to speed the process along. 

“I was planning on it,” he stated, causing Bael and the other demons listening to their conversation to visibly relax. “But other than that issue the situation down here is under control?”

Bael confirmed that it was, so Lucifer took his leave. And for nearly the next week (at least in Hell-time), he flew around the infernal realm in a constant effort to fix the damage. It was exhausting work, so when he finally finished cauterizing the last rip, and thus shoving Hell back into near-perfect alignment, he collapsed on his bed back at his palace, sleeping for the first time since his arrival down below. 

When he awoke some time later, there was a heavy weight flopped across his chest, and soft fur had somehow found its way into his mouth. 

“Aza,” he grumbled, shoving at the hellhound who for some reason always liked to sleep on his head. “Get off me, girl.”

The dog huffed but complied with his command, shifting over so he could sit up. His other two personal hounds, Zeev and Rhan, were curled up at the foot of his luxuriously large bed. Like good boys, he thought, side-eyeing the only female of the pack even as he reached out to scratch behind her ears. 

He really had missed them these last five years, and now he needed them on Earth, the only happy thing to come out of this whole catastrophe. 

Throwing his arms above his head in a full-body stretch, he rolled out of bed and went about making himself presentable. Once he’d finished dressing, he gestured for his hounds to follow him and made his way towards the main gate out of Hell at a leisurely pace, ignoring the demons that dropped into bows as he passed. 

He’d already informed Lilith, the leader of the Lilim, his best legion of hunters, to be on the lookout for his call, just in case he ended up needing them to come topside. So there was nothing left for him to do in Hell. Now he needed to go handle the supremely more difficult task of wrangling the Hell Beasts that had made it to the earthly plane. 

And to think, all he’d wanted was a nice century or two of vacation time. Honestly, angels screwed everything up.


	2. Murder at Boyle Heights

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A couple of the conversation points in this chapter are drawn directly from the show, specifically episodes 1.12 and 2.01. It’s nothing major, but if you think you recognize a turn of phrase from somewhere, that’s where I got it.

When Lucifer arrived back at his penthouse—the sun just starting to set on what he assumed was the same day he had left—Maze was already there waiting. 

The hellhounds all shook their heads, wriggling around to dispel the general discomfort of cross-dimensional travel, and then Aza caught sight of the demon and darted forward with an excited yip to jump up and lick her face.

Of course, hellhounds were massive creatures. Taller than a Great Dane and thicker around in general than most mortal dogs, all three of his hounds looked huge standing next to his tall frame; against Maze, well, she may as well have been a child being tackle hugged by a wolf, and it was no surprise when she was immediately knocked to the ground. 

Not that Maze seemed to mind. She hugged the animal back just as happily, scratching behind Aza’s ears just the way she liked. 

“No loyalty, that one,” Lucifer muttered with an eye roll, resting his hands on Zeev and Rhan who were sitting obediently on either side of him. 

Maze finally shoved Aza off, and the hound trotted back to Lucifer, eyes glowing bright with joy and fur drifting around her like wisps of dark smoke. “Ach, none of that now,” he reprimanded gently, tapping her on her nose. “No infernal aspects while we’re on Earth. We wouldn’t want to accidentally frighten the mortals.”

All three hounds dipped their heads in acknowledgement, and Aza’s fur solidified, her eyes dulling to a deep red, like the color of dried blood. Still intimidating as _Hell,_ giant wolf-like creatures that they were, but at least they didn’t look supernatural any longer. 

Satisfied that his pets understood the ground rules, Lucifer turned to address Maze. “You have any success on your end?”

The demon strolled forward, dressed seductively as ever in her black leather get-up, and Lucifer spared a brief thought to wonder if it was too soon to give in to make-up sex. 

She handed him a list even as she started summarizing her report. “I’ve got accurate locations on 81 of them. No immediate threats, so I left them alone for now so I could focus on tracking down the rest. Nothing from the Deep Pits though, a day wasn’t enough time to find any of _those,_ assuming some of them escaped.”

Lucifer hummed. “Best estimate Bael could give me was 97. We lost more than 300 guards in the Deep Pits during the breakout though, so it’s safe to assume most of the ones you couldn’t locate are from there.”

Maze, in typical fashion, reacted to the news with a string of furious and highly creative cursing, a large portion of which involved inventive ways to mutilate certain pieces of Amenadiel’s anatomy. 

“And here I thought you had a soft spot for that particular part of my holier-than-thou brother,” Lucifer sniped. “The allure of teaching a virgin worn off already, m’dear?”

She glared in response but didn’t offer any kind of retort, so Lucifer went back to scanning through her report, pausing three pages in to look back at her questioningly. “Is this right? 36 all in one spot?”

“You know that group, _hive-minded,_ ” she shuddered in revulsion. He nodded, immediately comprehending who she meant. Nobody liked Hell Beasts, but Maze had always particularly despised the ones with insect-esque forms. And the members of this particular group, looking like some nightmarish horse-sized combination of a tarantula, a wasp, and a crab, were especially creepy, even by Hell’s standards. 

Good news for them though, the hive-minded ones weren’t particularly hard to deal with; they could take care of a solid third of their escapees within the day. 

“Looks like they’re all staying close to LA, that’s good.”

Maze shrugged. “Far as I can tell, they don’t seem too inclined to head east.”

“They must like California’s high concentration of mortals,” he muttered, sharing a look of grim satisfaction with his demon. It meant a higher death toll in the short-term, but it also meant a quicker resolution. 

Just then, the elevator dinged and all three hounds jumped to their feet, deep growls rumbling in their chests, though Lucifer was pleased to see them keeping to their non-infernal forms. He waved them down absently and greeted the new arrival with a plastered on smile. “Detective! What a surprise.”

She stopped dead, staring at the dogs who had gone back to lounging at his feet. “L-Lucifer?”

“Yes, hello,” he replied and after another beat of silence, prompted, “Are you quite alright, Detective?”

“A-are those _wolves_?” she asked, sounding a bit strangled. Lucifer took a moment to surreptitiously sniff the air, brows furrowing when he decided that no, there were no odd smells that could account for the Detective’s sudden desire to breathe shallowly. 

“Of course not,” he smirked, waiting until her shoulders began to slump in relief before continuing, “They’re hellhounds.”

She straightened back up, spine gone instantly stiff, and Lucifer grinned. She made a delightful image when riled. “Lucifer! You can’t have wolves in the middle of Los Angeles…in an apartment! Please tell me you at least have a permit!”

“I don’t need a permit,” he explained, tone chiding. “Because these are not wolves, Detective.”

“What if they hurt someone, Lucifer?” she asked, appearing increasingly agitated. “You need—”

“They’re not going to hurt anyone. They’d never attack without my command,” he cut her off in an attempt to placate her. For some reason, she didn’t look especially reassured by his words though, so he continued, “Besides, hellhounds weren’t bred to hunt mortals, at least not ones that are still alive. The humans of L.A. are perfectly safe.” 

“Lucifer, wolves aren’t domesticated,” she said, speaking slowly like she thought he was having trouble understanding basic English. “You can’t be sure…”

“Not wolves!” he countered. 

“Hellhounds…don’t…exist!” Her voice actually went a little shrill towards the end, and Maze started snickering beside him. The sharp look the Detective sent his demon made it clear she didn’t see the humor in this situation. 

“The three right in front of you would tend to demonstrate that they do,” he pointed out reasonably. 

She huffed, nostrils flaring, before she shook her head, closing her eyes for a long moment. “Whatever,” she sighed, rolling her shoulders. “I’ll get you the forms for a permit later. This isn’t why I came over…I’ve been trying to reach you all day—”

“Ah, well, you know me. Busy, busy, no rest for the wicked.”

“Right, because deviant foreplay is so time consuming,” she stared pointedly at Maze, who was fondling one of her demon blades rather suggestively. 

“Wanna watch,” Maze asked, arching a brow and running her tongue along the knife’s edge. And wasn’t that an enticing idea. Too bad the Detective probably wouldn’t go for it. 

And sure enough, her expression settled into a brief moue of distaste before she barreled on, completely bypassing the proposition. “I’ve got a case that I can’t do without you.”

“Really?” Lucifer perked up, eyes bright with intrigue, but a quick glance at Maze reminded him that he really didn’t have the time to be playing handsome devil cop at the moment. “What’s so special about it?”

“You’ll just have to see for yourself,” she replied, and normally that would have been enough to have him chasing at her heels, but right now he needed more. 

“Look, Detective, I really am very busy at the moment, so…”

“Please,” she implored. “Just come to Boyle Heights with me. I promise, this is a case with a pulse.” 

“Boyle Heights?” he asked, eyes flickering down to Maze’s report. 

“Yeah,” she confirmed, looking relieved when he started to nod in acceptance. Maze, on the other hand, looked alarmed.

Yanking him down, she whispered in his ear, “You can’t seriously be thinking about going out there alone? With her?”

“Yes, I am,” he muttered back.

“But you just told me last night you’d figured out what triggers your…little _problem_! This is dangerous, Lucifer.”

“That was before,” he argued, shrugging his shoulders meaningfully. “We don’t know that it’s still—”

“But we don’t know that it’s not!”

“I’ve got to check it out, Maze.”

She eyed the stubborn set of his jaw and changed tracks. “At least take one of the hounds with you.”

He sighed, but conceded that it was a good idea. “You don’t mind if I bring Rhan with me, do you Detective?” he spoke up, addressing the mortal woman who had been watching the quiet back and forth with a mildly suspicious expression. 

She gaped at him with more than her usual level of incredulity. “You want to bring your wolf? To a crime scene? You can’t be serious.”

“He’s very well behaved,” he assured her, scratching behind the dog’s ears and smiling as the animal leaned into his touch. 

“That’s so not the point, Lucifer. You can’t bring your… _pet_ to a murder scene! Just the possibility of contamination alone—”

“He won’t mess anything up, promise! I’ll just tell him to stay behind your little tape, no problem.”

“No problem. Right.”

“Right,” Lucifer smiled, pretending not to have noticed the sarcasm heavy in the Detective’s voice. “He could help, you know. If you weren’t so against him.”

“Right, the wolf could help.”

“He’s a scent hound,” Lucifer sniffed, straightening out his slightly askew cufflink. “He could just sniff out your murderer, lead you right to him.”

Chloe rolled her eyes, exasperated. “That’s not how K-9 units work.”

“Maybe not mortal ones,” he retorted. 

“Lucifer, you can’t bring—”

“You wouldn’t deny me my comfort animal, would you Detective? I’ve heard I’m entitled to one these days.”

“Since when do you need an emotional support animal?”

“It’s a recent development.” Chloe arched a brow, clearly unimpressed, so he added, “We can call my therapist, if you’d like?”

She sighed, pinching her nose in a sign of frustration. “No, we need to get to the crime scene. Just promise me I’m not going to regret this?”

“Promise!” he chirped, all smug charm now that he’d won. “And as you know, I’m a Devil of my word, Detective.”

🔥 ✨ 🔥 ✨ 😈✨ 🔥 ✨ 🔥

Thanks to Lucifer’s newfound paranoia about partaking in dangerous activities within the Detective’s vicinity, they arrived at the crime scene—a new-age church of all things, which was just typical—in separate cars nearly an hour after leaving Lux. 

He hopped out of his corvette as soon as Chloe pulled up behind him, Rhan pressed close to his side, and made for the entrance. The Devil chuckled, highly amused, when the officers and various bystanders hovering outside the building skittered back in fright at the sight of his hellhound, the Detective shooting him a chiding look from his other side. 

“Dude, what the Hell is that!” Daniel shouted when he spotted them.

“What the Hell, indeed,” Lucifer purred.

Chloe elbowed him gently in the side and clarified, “It’s his emotional support dog, Dan.”

“That thing?” the other detective pointed at Rhan, wide-eyed. “That’s a wolf, a really big ass wolf!”

Lucifer sighed, mildly annoyed. It was amusing when it was the Detective arguing with him, not so much when it was her estranged husband. “Hellhound, actually,” he corrected, tone mild. 

Daniel backed up several more steps, eying Rhan warily. “Hellhound, sure. I don’t think it’s legal to keep a wolf as an ESA pet, Chloe. Did you tell him that?"

“No need to look so worried, Detective Douche,” Lucifer singsonged, clapping the mortal man on his shoulder. “He’d only rip someone apart if I told him to.”

“Lucifer!” Chloe hissed; he winked at her in response, pleased to see her lips twitching like she was fighting back a smile of her own. 

“You must be Detective Decker’s civilian consultant,” a new voice chirped and Lucifer turned to see an attractive hispanic woman dressed in a standard forensics team jacket assembling a high-tech camera. “They told me you never break character, but wow, is that really your dog?”

“You’re new here, aren’t you?” he asked, sure he had never seen her face before.

“Oh yeah, sorry! Ella Lopez, I just transferred in a couple days ago,” she introduced herself, darting forward with a bright smile to wrap him in a hug. He endured it with stiff awkwardness, bewildered as always by the need some humans felt to bestow affection on complete strangers. 

“Lucifer Morningstar,” he replied when she released him. 

“Cool,” she smiled, concentration returning to her equipment. 

Lucifer cocked his head to the side in an inquisitive gesture, eyeing the dainty cross hanging from her neck. “I was expecting a different reaction considering your choice of bling.”

“Oh. Dude, I had a friend named Adolf, okay? Adolf. I didn’t hold it against him. And besides, I think the Devil gets a bad rap.”

“Oh?” he asked, leaning forward with sudden eagerness. “You do, do you?”

“Sure, I mean, what’d he really do that was so bad?” she shrugged. “Rebel against his dad? Ask some naked lady if she wanted an apple?”

“Be still my heart, do go on,” Lucifer grinned, awaiting more complimentary comments. 

“I suppose he does run Hell. That’s not so great. You know, with the torture and eternal damnation,” she waived her hand in an etcetera motion. 

“Yes, well, I’m retired…sort of.” 

She peered up at him with raised brows, trying to decide if this was just the kind of normal L.A. weirdness she would have to get used to in her new home. “So, what’s your deal? You some kind of method actor or something?”

“What?” Lucifer squinted at her, taken aback. 

“What kind of dog is he, anyway?” she asked as she moved towards the hellhound, holding her hand out for him to sniff. “He’s not really a wolf, is he? Only I know they have some of those breeds that were bred to look like wolves, but are really just sweet—”

Rhan started growling, a deep, grumbling thing, when Ella was about three feet away, and she jerked her hand back as if she’d been burned. 

“Hush, Rhan,” Lucifer chided. “We like Ms. Lopez.”

At his words, the hound immediately went quiet. His mouth opened, tongue lolling out in a canine grin, tail wagging happily, and moved to nudge Ella’s hand gently. She relaxed and rewarded the friendly greeting with a scratch behind his ears, murmuring sweet nothings to the animal. 

“That one though,” Lucifer spoke up a moment later, pointing at Dan with a smirk that was pure mischief, “that one you can growl at.”

Rhan’s head instantly swiveled to lock dull red eyes on Dan; his lips pulled back in a snarl, the ruff at his neck puffed up threateningly, and the terrifying rumbling started back up.

“Oh come on man,” Dan squeaked, backing away with his hands held up in the universal sign of ‘I am not a threat.’ “Make him stop!”

Lucifer was fighting down giggles when Chloe finally spoke up, tone irritated despite its slight shakiness. “Lucifer, you promised I wouldn’t regret letting you bring him. I’m starting to regret it.”

He sighed, disappointed his opportunity to torment the Douche was over, and called Rhan off. “No more scaring the police officers, boy. Unless one of them’s the murderer,” he added after a moment’s thought. “Then do point him out, please.”

Rhan sat back on his haunches, once again the picture of a happy puppy. 

“See Detective, I told you he’d do as I say,” the Devil sniffed, lifting his head up in a superior expression.

“Including rip someone apart, apparently,” Dan muttered loud enough for everyone to hear. 

“I doubt that will be necessary,” Lucifer responded in all seriousness, missing the disturbed looks on half the officers’ faces and the indulgent amusement on Chloe’s as he stepped forward to get a good look at the murder victim. “Is this it? Just the one dead girl?”

Chloe looked at him askance. “Um, yes? Were you expecting more? 

“Well yes, frankly, I was. This doesn’t look like the work of Hell Beasts at all.”

“Hell Beasts?” And now her tone was a clash between exasperation and concern.

“Hmmm, yes,” Lucifer muttered, not really paying attention to his partner as he tried to figure out if this could be related in any way to his Hell problem. “Don’t worry, I’m taking care of it,”

“Lucifer, if you know about an imminent crime, you need to tell me.”

At that, his attention was finally pulled from the dead girl. The Detective looked truly concerned; as well she should, even if she wouldn’t be much help dealing with the breakout. “Well I don’t know the when or where, or even the what…just general mayhem and destruction kind of thing. But don’t worry, I’ve got it handled.”

“Lucifer—”

“Look, I still don’t understand why you need me on this case.”

Chloe huffed, looking like she was praying for patience, and ordered one of the forensic techs to roll the body over. 

“Hail Lucifer?” he whispered leaning in close. “This is sickening.”

“I know, it’s horrific.”

“No, I mean blaming it on me! It’s an atrocity! These misguided satanist nob-heads with frisbees in their earlobes. This poor girl’s death has nothing to do with me, Detective.”

Then, as if his father just wanted to spite his words, that con-artist preacher he’d traumatized with his Devil face a few weeks back burst through the door, ranting about his evil influence and yada yada ya. Malcolm Graham got rid of him easily enough, and with a few over-friendly words to Lucifer and some entirely unnecessary touching, the resurrected detective followed the crazy preacher out of the building, skirting around Rhan who had started growling at him with serious intent.

Lucifer watched him leave, then turned to address his dog with a raised brow. “Are you growling at him because he’s a resurrected soul, because he tried to shoot me last night, or because he’s the murderer?”

Rhan sneezed and tapped his paw three times. 

“Ah,” Lucifer nodded and turned to look at the Detective, who was staring at him with wide eyes.

“Lucifer? Did Malcolm seriously try to shoot you yesterday?”

“Yes. And,” he confirmed, pausing dramatically before continuing, “He’s also your murderer!”

He smiled, pleased to have figured this homicide out so quickly for her, but Chloe seemed determined to completely ignore the second part of his sentence. 

“Lucifer, why didn’t you report it?”

“Well because I talked him out of it, of course.”

“That’s not the point! Threatening to shoot you is serious! You should’ve gone to the police immediately.”

“Well I’m telling you now, _and_ he’s your killer. So, you can lock him up and throw away the key. Case closed.”

“There’s no evidence linking him to this crime. You can’t just accuse someone because your wolf-dog growled at him, even if he did assault you.”

“Fine, keep investigating. I know you need more for your little human justice system. But I promise you, your murderer just walked out the door.”

“I will keep investigating, if it’s all the same to you. So if we could please, do our jobs?”

“Actually Detective, I’m afraid you’ll have to excuse me,” he informed her as he texted Maze to meet him. They may as well go ahead and take care of the hive-minded while he was in the area. “I’ve got other business I need to take care of.”

“Lucifer! You can’t just take off in the middle of a case!”

“I already identified your killer!” he retorted, fighting down what he knew was unwarranted aggravation. “And I really do have other things to do, so…”

He studiously ignored the Detective’s indignation and strolled towards the exit, Rhan trailing at his heels. He had some Hell Beasts that needed to be sent back to the Pits, no single murder could trump that.

Chloe would agree, if she ever believed his claims.


	3. Oh, Brother

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In the spirit of Lucifer’s terrible communication skills à la sent-mum-to-a-different-universe, here is an emoji summary of this chapter:
> 
> (😈 +🐺+💋) 🤺 (🧟🦟) 👉🏼 🔥 🎉 … (😈+😇 ) 🗣 🙄 🤬 🥺 🥾

By the time Maze arrived at the innocuous street in Boyle Heights that marked their chosen entrance into this section of the L.A. sewage tunnels, Lucifer had managed to smoke three cigarettes and was contemplating lighting up a fourth. 

“About time,” he greeted her, to which she merely rolled her eyes and brushed past him to wrench open the manhole in the center of the road. 

“After you,” she cocked a brow, a little smirk daring him to complain. 

Lucifer eyed the hole with distaste, fingers brushing over the buttons of his shirtfront. He wished he’d thought through his wardrobe more carefully when he was dressing this morning. His Louboutin’s were no doubt about to be ruined, and he doubted the smell would ever come out of his suit. He’d never be able to wear this ensemble again. 

With a sigh of resignation, he swung himself down the ladder, Maze and the hounds following right after, which would have looked odd to a mortal: three large dogs climbing down a ladder like any other person. 

The tunnels at the bottom were as dark and damp as one would expect, not that any of Hell’s inhabitants had any trouble seeing, but the smell was not quite as rancid as Lucifer had feared. More stale and mildewy than anything. Even so, the Devil wasted no time voicing his complaints, keeping up a constant stream of disparaging comments as they moved purposefully through the twists and turns of the the wide passageways. 

After about 15 minutes of this—with Maze mostly ignoring Lucifer while the hounds dutifully listened to their master—they started to hear loud chittering up ahead.

The group paused, and Maze handed over one of her demon blades without a word. Lucifer took the dagger, but made a mental note to grab his own Hell-forged sword when he dropped these hive-minded back below. Knives were really not his preferred method of fighting. 

“After you,” he waived Maze on in a sardonic imitation of her earlier words, knowing she hated the hive-minded as much as he hated the idea of ruining his clothes. 

She grumbled and moved forward, taking up position on his right so he could fight left-handed, while the hounds fanned out behind them, and together they ghosted out of the tunnel and into the cavernous chamber that was hosting the Hell Beasts. 

The floor was damp with more than water, red blood dripping down from the walls; the horse-sized bugs, 36 in total, were scattered around the room, busy fighting over what looked to be the shredded remains of the better part of the Boyle Heights homeless population. In some spots, entire bodies lay untouched, while in others, three or more of the monsters were struggling over single arms. 

Their great, large crab claws would rip off small hunks of flesh; then, quick at they’d darted into the melee to steal their prize from their brethren, the creatures would retreat, eight hairy spider legs skittering backwards at high velocity, bringing them and their food to safety. And back again they’d go seconds later, their tiny morsel ground to soup by their strong mandibles in less time than it took to blink. 

“Well,” Lucifer pronounced, not bothering to keep his voice down, “I guess we can figure out what drew the little beasties down here.”

It was eery, the way the whole room went still, 36 pairs of giant wasp eyes, flickering red with hellfire, turning to lock on the five newcomers. 

Maze huffed a laugh, torn between delight and aggravation at the careless way Lucifer had thrown away their element of surprise.

“Winner’s prize?” she asked, hoping he would agree to turn this into a game.

He leered at her in response, dark promises dancing in his eyes. “You take down 19, and I’ll let you tie me up with hell-chains.” 

And with that they both leapt forward to meet the charging monsters, matching grins lighting their faces with manic glee, the hounds baying war cries echoing behind them. 

After millennia battling with one another in the depths of Hell, Maze and Lucifer, together with the hellhounds, worked together like a well-oiled machine, dancing among their foes with a deadly precision unmatched by anything native to the earthly plane. 

Lucifer dodged left and swung his dagger down to stab his first attacker directly behind its head in a paralyzing blow, then rolled with the motion to avoid a second beast, allowing its stinger to instead strike down a third before he plunged his blade through its chest cavity. 

“That’s three!” he shouted, glancing to his right for just long enough to see Maze incapacitate another insect with a series of quick jabs to the thing’s leg joints. 

“Four!” she panted back.

And on it went, ducking and weaving, their knives tearing through hard exoskeletons, instinctively coming to each other’s aid when necessary before departing to rain down more destruction in opposite directions. In one particularly memorable flash of motion, Lucifer spotted his dogs ripping one of the creatures apart as its body was pulled in three different directions; and in another, Maze somehow managed to simultaneously behead one beast while throwing a blade straight through the eye of another. 

In the end, neither Maze nor Lucifer managed 19 takedowns, the hounds getting credit for nine, which left only 14 for Maze and 13 for the Devil. 

“I still won,” she insisted as they walked around attaching a thin line of hell-chain to each of the barely twitching Hell Beasts (and various detached insect parts).

“The deal was 19,” Lucifer singsonged back. “Beating me by one was only a half-win.”

“But you admit, I did beat you,” she said, pointing one of her demon blades at him in emphasis.

He stepped behind her, wrapping one arm around her waist as he pressed himself fully against her back, his other hand reaching up to caress along the graceful line of her neck, and purred her ear, “Wanted to tie me up, didn’t you Mazey?”

“Mmm,” she hummed her agreement, shivering as the fingers at her neck squeezed ever so gently.

He chuckled, the sound vibrating through her. “Then make sure to win our next bet,” he commanded, sucking lightly at her throat and grinding his obvious interest against her before stepping away. 

She glared at him for the tease, a pout almost forming on her face before she could control the expression, and went back to tying up the Hell Beasts, much to his amusement. 

A few minutes later, their captives were ready for transport, so Lucifer extended his wings and grabbed one end of the chain, ready to drag them back to Hell. “While I’m gone, Maze, be a dear a dispose of all these humans,” he ordered, tone sliding easily from its earlier seductive timbre to a more glib nonchalance. 

She cast a look around at the bloody mess of a room and retorted, “They look pretty well disposed of to me.”

“Just put them somewhere they’ll be found, somewhere that wild animals could’ve gotten to them,” he rolled his eyes.

She looked at him askance. “Why? It’s not like anyone would ever find them if we left them here.”

“Yes, well,” he shrugged, “the Detective insists all human bodies should get a proper burial. Some weird mortal sentimentality, but they’d probably like to have these ones found.”

“They do know the person’s not still in the corpse, don’t they?”

“I think so?” he said, but his answer sounded more like a question, and Maze shook her head in disbelief. 

“I’ll never understand humans,” she muttered; Lucifer grimaced in agreement. “But fine, if you want them thrown out in the woods, I’ll throw them out in the woods.”

“Well then,” he smiled, “I’ll see you back at Lux when you’re finished. And think, at least this way there won’t be rotting people in our drinking water.”

And with that Lucifer launched himself into the air, disappearing down into the infernal realm to the sound of Maze’s startled laughter. 

The only demons present when he arrived at the Pits were all low-ranking, so he didn’t bother to stay and chat, instead opting to dump his load on the guards with instructions to update Bael and leaving as quickly as he’d arrived, with a quick pitstop at his armory to collect his favorite sword, a beautiful obsidian weapon forged in hellfire from one of his own primary feathers. 

Tasks in Hell thus complete, Lucifer departed his kingdom, eager to relax at his piano and drink fine scotch for the rest of the night. 

Unnoticed by his lord, Bael stood hunched against the palace gates, cursing as he watched the Devil fly away.

🔥 ✨ 🔥 ✨ 😈✨ 🔥 ✨ 🔥

The next morning, Lucifer decided to stop by the precinct, figuring he should check and see if the Detective had made any progress towards arresting Malcolm Graham. In the mean time, he’d sent Maze off with all three of his hellhounds to continue rounding up the lesser Hell Beasts, reckoning he’d be safe enough at the police station to forego bringing a guard dog along. 

But he’d barely been at the station ten minutes, hardly enough time to fetch the Detective her first cup of coffee, when he was proven wrong. 

“What are you doing here?” he hissed, staring with a mix of shock and anger at his two brothers, brothers he’d scarcely seen hide nor hair of in millennia. 

“We’ve come to help, brother.” Michael stated, tone and stance as assured as ever Lucifer remembered them being, even as Gabriel smiled at him uncertainly. 

Lucifer narrowed his eyes, displeasure rapidly beginning to overcome his initial surprise. “And you chose to meet me here? Of all places?” he asked, stepping forward aggressively, the cup of coffee he’d poured for Chloe dangling forgotten in his hand. 

“This is where you are?” Gabriel, Lucifer noted, at least has the decency to look a little sheepish at Michael’s words, but then Michael had never been the best at diplomacy. 

“You couldn’t have waited for me at Lux?” said Lucifer, trying to drop a not-so-subtle hint that seemed to go right over Michael’s head. 

“Uriel said you wouldn’t be there until after midnight.”

“Of course, and my need for your divine help was just so pressing you couldn’t have waited a couple of hours to offer up your services.”

“Lucifer, the situation is serious, and it just got—”

Looking away from his brother’s intense stare, Lucifer noticed for the first time the attention the three of them were garnering from the rest of the precinct. Clenching his jaw, he grabbed both of his brothers’ arms and dragged them into the empty conference room, cutting off Michael’s sentence to say, “I’ve got it handled, so you can piss off back to the Silver City.”

“We can’t do that, Lucifer,” Michael shook his head in denial.

At the same moment, Gabriel piped up for the first time, saying, “It’s not just the Hell Beasts that have escaped!”

“Yes, I know, the mortal Amenadiel resurrected,” Lucifer drawled, rolling his eyes. “Hardly the kind of thing that would require three archangels to deal with.”

Gabriel and Michael traded an unreadable look, and the former said, “We’re not talking about that silly damned human, Lucifer.”

“We’re talking about Mum,” Michael completed delivering the news. 

“Mum?” Lucifer choked. “You can’t be serious. Her cell’s got a million and one locks on it. For Dad’s sake, it’s all the way at the bottom of the…Deep Pits. Oh.”

“Yes, oh,” Gabriel mocked, his attempt at levity falling flat in the face of such terrifying information. 

Lucifer snorted anyways, looking back and forth between his brothers with narrowed eyes. “And you expect us to work together on this, is that it?” 

“You help us get mum back to Hell, and we’ll help you with the rest of the Hell Beasts,” Gabriel offered, expression earnest. 

The Devil was quiet for a long moment, suspicion drawing his lips down in a tight frown, before he finally replied, “No deal.”

“You can’t be serious,” Michael reared back, appearing genuinely taken aback by Lucifer’s refusal. 

“What’s that mortal saying?” Lucifer shot back, arching a contemptuous brow. “As a heart attack? You don’t know the first thing about Hell Beasts. It wouldn’t surprise me a bit if all you feathered pricks think that they’re just another type of demon. And the only reason you want my help with Mum is because we all know she’s going to try to kill me, and wouldn’t it be convenient if you could save yourselves the trouble of tracking her down by just hanging around me until she shows up to do the deed! Well, if that’s your goal, feel free to wait on the benches outside of Lux; she’s bound to turn up eventually. Don’t bother coming inside though, you’d just kill the party.”

Before the conversation could continue along its swift downward spiral, Chloe knocked on the glass door and stepped into the room without waiting to be invited in, asking if everything was alright. 

“Detective!” Lucifer spun to greet his partner, smile only a little strained. “Hi, yes, we’re just peachy. In fact, they were just about to leave.”

“No we were not,” Michael denied and continued the conversation as though they had not been interrupted. “Brother, this is not the time for your pride or your paranoia. We need to work together.”

Lucifer turned back to glower at him, shoulders stiff with restrained violence. “No, _you_ need _me_. Not the other way around.”

“Of all the ridiculous!” Michael bellowed, hand slashing though the air in a gesture of pure frustration. “It’s not us mum’s going to—”

“Brothers! Wow, I didn’t realize you had more than just Amenadiel,” Chloe cut in from her spot by the door in an attempt to forestall a shouting match. All three brothers turned in unison to look at her, clearly having forgotten that she was in the room with them. 

“Ah, yes. Loads more, actually,” Lucifer informed her in a mutter. 

She looked at him expectantly for several awkward seconds before finally asking, “Well, aren’t you going to introduce me?”

Lucifer blinked. “Right, Detective, Michael and Gabriel,” he grouched, pointing to each in turn. “Michael, Gabriel, the Detective.”

She shot her partner a look of fond exasperation and reached her hand out to make a proper introduction, “Chloe Decker, it’s nice to meet you both.”

The two men returned her greeting with all of the general pleasantries, and then they all just stood there, staring at one another.

“So…your parents really favored biblical names, huh?” 

Lucifer and Michael gazed back at her with identical twin smirks while Gabriel broke down in seemingly helpless giggles at her words. 

“Story of our lives, really,” Lucifer informed her wryly.

“Right, because you’re the Devil. And Michael and Gabriel here are actually _that_ Michael and Gabriel,” Chloe sarcastically guessed. “Who’s older anyway? You all look about the same age.”

“Exactly the same age, if you don’t want to get technical about all that extra time I got from my millennia in Hell.”

“You’re a triplet?” True to form, the Detective opted to ignore the part of his sentence that referenced his non-human reality in favor of the more believable, at least to her, assertion that he was the product of a multiple birth, a fact which obviously came as a great surprise to the woman, based on the way she blinked at them for several long seconds with an almost gobsmacked expression on her face. 

“Of course not,” Lucifer scoffed. “The archangels are octuplets, Detective. You know, the seven blowing their trumpets up in Heaven, and your’s truly,” here he bent in a little bow, “reigning down in Hell and all that.”

“Octuplets?” she choked, disbelief written all over her face. “But, you don’t, well, you don’t really…look that much…like each other.” 

He supposed that to human eyes, which couldn’t see the divine power that marked them so clearly as archangels to other supernatural beings, they probably didn’t look related. If they were connected by blood at all, mortals would tend to believe it could only be as half-siblings. Certainly not the ⅜’s of a set of octuplets that he claimed they were. 

With his long dark black hair, high cheekbones, and russet brown skin, Gabriel almost appeared Native American; except for his clear blue eyes, which were set above a smile so easy and boyishly innocent as to make his face seem alien when contrasted with his two brothers’ more imposing miens.

Michael, on the other hand, was, quite literally, the golden child. Golden curls brushed over golden-tan skin, which somehow enhanced his impossibly golden eyes rather than making him look monochromatic. Even his wings matched, as bright a gold as Gabriel’s were silver, the sun and moon captured in celestial feathers. Not that the Detective could see those.

And then there was Lucifer. Tall, dark, and handsome, he was sin in human form. Standing next to his brothers, Chloe could almost believe he was the real Devil, if only to reconcile how these three supposedly related men could exude such vastly different auras, the sheer seduction that dripped from her partner in sharp contrast to the pureness radiating from both Michael and Gabriel. 

“Right,” Lucifer said after yet another uncomfortable pause, “Well like I said, Detective, my brothers were just about to leave. And…I suppose I need to go too. Since they just got in town and all that. Unexpected visitors really are the worst, don’t you agree?”

“Oh, uh, sure… It was nice to meet you!” she called after them as Lucifer hauled the other two archangels out to his car. Bloody inconvenient timing, he never did get his update on the whole Malcolm arrest status thing.

“Thank you for agreeing to talk, brother,” Michael remarked in what the Devil assumed was an attempt to sound gracious. 

Lucifer was tempted, so tempted, to refute his brother’s words, but he knew that the best way to get them off his back was to go ahead and agree to hear them out. “The corvette only has two seats, so one of you can come back with me to Lux, and we can have our little _chat_. And the other can bugger off and go find leads on Mum, or something.”

Lucifer watched with mild chagrin as Michael immediately moved to sit in the car. The blonde was so much easier to be angry with than Gabriel. On the plus side, it would be easier to kick him out after he turned down his offer for a second time. But on the downside, Lucifer’s fury today was now an inevitability.

“Alright then, Gabriel. Shoo,” Lucifer flapped his hands at his more tolerable bother, slid into the driver’s seat of his car with a put-upon sigh, and tore out of the parking lot without pausing to wait for a response.

And a little over half an hour later the two were walking into the Devil’s apartment above Lux, Michael insisting to an exasperated Lucifer that he should accept their help, that a couple more angels were the answer to all his problems. 

“What’s next,” Lucifer mocked, pouring himself a very full glass of whisky, “are you going to suggest we should bring Amenadiel in to help clean up this mess too?”

“Well, it can’t hurt. Things would go faster with more hands on deck.”

Lucifer choked, coughing around the burn of liquor caught in the wrong pipe. “Can’t hurt? Sure, let’s bring in the idiot who caused this whole _bloody_ catastrophe in the first place! See if he doesn’t screw it all up even more!”

“Typical,” Michael glared, tugging at his gold curls almost hard enough to hurt. “You’re not going to accept any responsibility for this, are you? It’s all Amenadiel’s fault, and you’re completely innocent.”

“Me? You’re really going to try to place the blame for this one on me? You’re right, that is just _typical_ ,” Lucifer sneered. 

“Amenadiel messed up. Clearly—”

“Understatement,” the dark-haired archangel muttered under his breath, and Michael raised his voice to continue talking over him. 

“—But none of this would have happened if you had just gone back to Hell like you were supposed to. If you’d just been reasonable at any point in the last five _years_ , and heeded his requests—”

“Reasonable? Oh, you’ve got to be kidding me! I don’t know what the Silver City is like these days, _Brother_ , if the place would immediately fall into chaos if dear old Dad decided to take a break and actually enjoy the world he created for once, but I assure you Hell is perfectly capable of running just fine in my absence!”

“Obviously not!” Michael threw his arms out wide in a gesture meant to encompass the entire metaphorical storm currently raging around them. 

Lucifer leaned over the bar towards his brother, eyes beginning to light up with hellfire as he spoke. “None of this, _none of it_ , would have happened if you all hadn’t interfered. I could’ve been gone for centuries and Hell would have been just fine! But of course you bloody pillocks had to stick your big, over-intrusive noses in my business and wreck everything!”

“Centuries?” Michael hissed, voice gone quiet with fury. “You planned to be up here for _centuries_?”

“Yes,” Lucifer jeered, drawing the word out derisively. “After all those millennia downstairs, I thought I’d spend a hundred years up here…maybe 200? Give or take. A nice little sabbatical to kick back, relax, and fuck my way through the human population. But you couldn’t even give me five minutes, could you? Didn’t even get to finish my first drink topside before Amenadiel was breathing down my neck, did I? So maybe you can excuse me if I didn’t feel like listening to him when he kept badgering me every other day for the next five Dad-forsaken years!”

The golden-haired archangel shook his head, lips drawn in a tight line while his jaw muscles visibly clenched. “You irresponsible—”

“Irresponsible! Have you not heard a word I’ve said? It’s like I’m speaking in tongues, or something!” He knocked back remainder of his drink before saying with slow deliberation, “Hell-would-have-been-just- _fine_. I had systems in place. Barring celestial interference literally ripping holes in the fabric of the realm itself, I had contingencies for anything that could have gone wrong. What more could you _possibly_ have wanted from me!”

“I wanted you to DO. YOUR. JOB!” Michael yelled, face turning red in his fury, and Lucifer rocked back on his heals, lips parting with some unvoiced protest. Nearly a minute passed in silence as the golden angel stood there panting, looking like he would like nothing better than to punch his brother square in the face; then in a calmer voice, he said, “You’re the Lord of Hell, Lucifer. You should be in Hell, doing your job.”

“I can’t win with you, can I?” Lucifer almost whispered.“You’re not happy unless I’m somewhere where you can’t see me, are you?”

Michael shook his head, pain flashing briefly through his eyes. “That’s not—”

“You know, the mortals say forgiveness is divine. I’ve been in Hell for millennia, since the dawn of humanity. I guess grudges are divine too.”

“Lucifer…”

“You can see yourself out,” Lucifer dismissed his once-favorite brother, turning away. 

“Lucifer, I didn’t…We still need…”

“Go,” he reiterated, tone flat. 

“But—”

Lucifer whipped around in a sudden rage and hurled his empty glass at Michael. “GET OUT!”

And finally, Michael left.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In my church, we mostly don’t talk about angels in any kind of systematic way, so when I was trying to figure out who Lucifer’s fellow archangels would be, I was googling, which as you can imagine, provided me with a lot of conflicting information. Some Christian traditions don’t believe there are any archangels, some think the term just refers to Michael; others think there are 3 or 4, while still others think there are 10. Point being, I decided to go with 7 (as in the 7 who will blow their trumpets), plus Lucifer as the cast out eighth. And for those 7, I mostly went with ones I had heard of, which also allowed me to pick some that are female too. And I kept all the angels who have actually appeared in the show so far [ie Azrael and Uriel]. 
> 
> This is of course a work of complete fiction and not intended to espouse any particular theological opinions/views. So if you think I got my list wrong, feel free to comment on it, but I probably won’t be altering it.


	4. God Help Her

Lucifer barely registered Maze entering the penthouse, wrapped up as he was in his music, and the demon felt no desire to disturb her lord, instead quietly treading over to the bar to pour herself a drink while she watched him play. There was not a pianist alive who could best the Devil when he really got going, and she relished these moments when she got these world-class performances all to herself. 

He slipped smoothly from one song to another, from the Rolling Stones _Paint It, Black_ to Metallica’s _For Whom the Bell Tolls_ and up into Beyonce’s more recent _Halo_ , chords of the other two woven into the background seamlessly. Maze thought she could even detect some classical strains, _Ave Maria_ and _Moonlight Sonata,_ bridged in occasionally. It was a masterful off-the-cuff remix, the songs blended perfectly into something totally unique yet still completely recognizable. 

Lucifer continued playing for over half an hour, and when he finally wound down, he looked noticeably less tense than when Maze had first arrived. 

“What happened?” she asked, tilting her head towards the shattered remains of one of the bar’s crystal goblets still littering the floor.

He twisted around on the piano bench to face her, not bothering to look at the broken glass. His eyes ran over the quickly fading bruise marring her face, his expression shifting from furious to hungry to languid almost too quickly for even a demon to catch. She knew her injuries reminded him of some of their more fun games, but Satan was a possessive bastard when it suited him, and he had a tendency to torture things that hurt those he cared about. 

“What happened, Maze, was my brothers showed up at the precinct,” he answered after he finished perusing her frame. 

“What? Why?”

“Seems they’ve decided we could use their help,” he rolled his eyes heavenward. 

She scoffed. “So Amenadiel’s decided to try and fix his mistake? Who’s he dragged along for the ride this time?”

“No, not Amenadiel. At least not yet.” Lucifer muttered last part bitterly, thinking back on his argument with Michael. “No, it’s Michael and Gabriel who’ve decided to pop on down.”

“Seriously? Your Father sent two _archangels_? Heaven’s never bothered to help with Hell’s problems before. What gives?”

“Well,” he drawled. “As if the Hell Beasts weren’t a big enough issue on their own, turns out, they’re not the only ones that escaped.”

“What else got out?” She asked, every inch of her frame taut with wariness. 

“Not a what, a who.” He closed his eyes as he answered her and sucked in several deep breaths. 

“Lucifer?” Maze prompted when he failed to elaborate. But he stayed silent, staring out the window with a clenched jaw. Fear that Maze would never give voice to began creeping into the shadows of her dark eyes at the Devil’s reticence. And true to form when faced with something that actually managed to frighten her, Maze pushed, “Come on, who escaped?” 

“Give me a moment. I’m not exactly sanguine about the situation myself.”

Demons were not exactly known for the virtue of patience though. Barely ten seconds passed before she growled, a wholly animal sound, and pointed one of her blades at him. “Lucifer!”

He sighed, not having the grace to even look concerned by the threat, and said, “My mum…is apparently running around free on Earth.”

“Is this a joke?”

“Unfortunately not.”

Maze jerked into a standing position and started pacing, looking more like a stalking panther than a ruffled human. She had knives in both of her hands; the weapons were continuously twirled around her fingers in an almost hypnotic, deadly pattern, an unconscious effort, Lucifer knew, to soothe her aggravation. 

He let her walk without interruption for several minutes, but when she finally moved behind the bar to pour herself a drink, he called out, “Bring the bottle over here, would you?”

She grabbed two and passed one over when she sat down next to him on the piano bench. “Where are Michael and Gabriel, then? Do they have any leads about where she might be?”

“Wouldn’t know,” he scoffed, taking several long pulls from his handle. “I turned down their help.”

Maze closed her eyes. If she would ever deign to pray to anyone other than Lucifer, he imagined she would be doing so now. “Please tell me that, at least, is a joke.”

He waved the hand holding his bottle of whiskey in a dismissive gesture. “They’re as ignorant as Amenadiel when it comes to Hell, and we see how well that worked out for him. They’d probably try to smite the Hell Beasts,” he finished derisively. 

“You could try telling them not to,” she said, voice honey sweet. 

“Yes, because my brothers and sisters have such a great track record with listening to me.”

“It might be different if you weren’t talking about your regular old family drama.” She continued talking quickly, heading off the indignant retort he so clearly wanted to voice. “Just tell them that smiting Hell Beasts would be the equivalent of dropping a giant mortal bomb. I bet they’d pay attention to you then.”

“We don’t need them,” he insisted stubbornly. “Not for this. If we run into trouble with the Deep Pitters, I’ll just call the Lilim. I’m not exactly lacking in resources, you know.”

“No demon’s a match for the Goddess of Creation, Lucifer. Not if she’s walking free. They might be assholes, but at least Gabriel and Michael can hold their own. And besides, your mom probably wouldn’t want to hurt either of them. Might give you an edge in a fight.”

It was a throwaway comment that hurt all the more for being true. “I’ve got my hounds to protect me,” he growled in a weak last-ditch effort to protest. Maze just arched an unimpressed eyebrow. “Oh fine, when they show up again, I’ll let them help. But I’m not making any deals with them!”

Maze rolled her eyes. “Whatever. Now, I’ve got 17 Hell Beasts tied up in the basement. So if you could go deal with them…”

“Lovely.” He stood and headed towards the elevator. “With my 14, that brings us up to 67. Only 14 regular Hell Beasts left to go. Then we can focus we on the infinitely more destructive Deep Pitters. Always fun.”

“You got 14? And here I thought you hadn’t done anything useful today.” She tossed the words at him with a sly smile, drawing a petulant glare from the archangel. 

“Yes well, Dr. Linda proved utterly useless this morning, and I had some aggression I needed to work out.”

The elevator dinged open to a long, dim hallway. At this basement level, there was a distinct lack of decoration. The walls were plain brick, the floor an unadorned concrete, and the evenly-spaced lightbulbs hung from the ceiling bare of any covering. Frankly, it looked like the kind of movie scene that would send the audience’s hearts pounding as they awaited the inevitable horror the main character would find upon stupidly running towards the screams. 

And there were screams. But unlike the hypothetical horror movie heroine, the Devil and his demon strode confidently towards the sounds of rage and pain. Lucifer dragged the solid steel door at the end of the hall open, and the noise level suddenly increased by several decibels. 

“Ah, you got the wendigos,” Lucifer nodded with approval, staring at the eight nightmarish creatures chained to the far wall and guarded by an alert Rhan. The beasts’ strangely elongated arms were tied over their heads, stretching their emaciated humanoid bodies out in a grim display as the things snarled at him. Bloody fangs and ferocious growls were not characteristics mortals typically associated with stags, and so were all the more disturbing for their presence on these man-eaters. 

“And a triad of harpies,” Maze boasted, pointing at a different set of monsters. The half-bird, half-woman vermin were the most intelligent of the lesser Hell Beasts. Lucifer gave a hum of appreciation low in his throat and wrapped his hand around Maze’s waist. 

“You have been a busy bee,” he whispered and kissed her ever so lightly on her neck. 

“I had to _lasso_ them, with a _whip_ ,” she bit her lip and nodded, eyebrows raised in an expression of cat-like satisfaction as she revelled in the remembered violence. 

Lucifer paused. “The one with the treble hooks? That I got from that delightful little man in Mumbai?”

“Mmmhmm,” she purred. “Worked like a charm.”

“Maze, what have I said about using my toys before I get to try them out?”

“Are you going to punish me?” She pressed closer to him, all sensual self-assurance. 

He huffed a laugh. It was tempting: she took it as beautifully as she dished it out. But he couldn’t forgive her this early in her bid to win back his favor. Bad precedent. He could wait more than a single bloody day before giving in. “Nice try, my dear,” he chuckled when she scowled. “But I believe I need to drag these abominations back to Hell.”

He pulled away and bent down to grab the end of the black chain that bound the 17 Hell Beasts in a line. And in a flash of ethereal white feathers he was gone. The instant cessation of otherworldly screeching was almost eery, but Maze only had a few minutes to mourn the loss of all those tortured sounds before Lucifer returned. 

“Any problems?”

He shook his head in the negative. “We have our corroborating evidence on my mum though. Seems she has escaped. Bael’s been having a private breakdown about it; was completely panicked when he finally managed to catch me.”

Maze rolled her eyes, well used to the other demon’s dramatics, and changed the subject slightly. “How are the Duke’s handling it?”

“Quietly. This is not a good time for the horde to riot.”

“Hell, it’s really just piling on at this point, isn’t it.”

“Mmm, and I think I’ve broken my therapist.”

“What? What’d you do to Linda?”

“Linda?” He arched his brows in question. “I didn’t realize you were on a first name basis…with my shrink.”

“We’re friends,” she shrugged with a little what-can-you-do gesture, then narrowed her eyes as a different thought hit her. “Lucifer, if you broke my only adult human friend…” She let the threat hang unfinished.

Somehow, Lucifer realized, he’d managed to land himself in the unenviable position of being the one who’d messed up. “I was careful,” he tried to backpedal. “I only showed her the bare minimum of Hell Fire in my eyes! And at her insistence too. How was I supposed to know even that would reduce her to a gibbering wreck?”

Every line of his body, from his slightly slumped shoulders to his fidgeting hands and pursed lips, showcased his misery over the situation. He’d never tried to prove his divinity to a still living mortal before, not one he didn’t want to hurt. And especially not one who was convinced that so-called ‘rational’ explanations existed for everything he could do. In the past, most people just believed him; they were much more devout back then: all he had to do was display his superior strength or fail to fall to a blade and bam, truth acknowledged. 

So he’d let his eyes glow with the tiniest bit of Hell Fire, something so inherently divine that Dr. Linda’s very soul would be forced to recognize his celestial origins. He hadn’t intended for that recognition to drive her into a catatonic state.

“Why didn’t you just show her your wings? At least those wouldn’t _scare_ her.”

He shot Maze an irritated glower for that suggestion. “I can’t go showing her my wings; the poor thing’s already having a Hell of a time resisting me. No need to make it worse.”

“Wait,” Maze drew the word out with slow disbelief. “You’re actually trying to help her to _not_ have sex with you?”

“Yes, shocking I know.”

“Why?” she asked, tone so full of incredulity as to be almost laughable.

“Doctor Linda claims not having sex will make my therapy more effective,” Lucifer informed her with as much confidence as he could muster, but at her continued look of skepticism he conceded with a sigh. “Yes, I don’t quite get it either, but that’s what she says.”

“And you believe her?”

“Well, what’s the point of having a therapist if you don’t listen to them?” He puffed up like an offended cat as he asked the question, oblivious to the fact that he frequently misinterpreted or outright ignored Linda’s advice. 

Maze nodded contemplatively, also missing the irony of his words. “Do you think that works for them; like, not having sex actually benefits humans?” she asked, still completely mystified.

Lucifer tilted his head in consideration. “You know, if she ever un-brakes, I might need to have her reexplain the whole no-sex-is-good thing. It seems very counterintuitive, doesn’t it?”

“Maybe you could un-brake her with your wings. At least she’d want to see you then,” she said with a sly grin.

He snorted, a wry half-smile tugging at his lips. “I should’ve just stabbed myself. Or made her stab me.” It may not have ensured Dr. Linda’s complete belief the way his fiery eyes had, but it would have been the safer option. 

Maze blinked. “Didn’t you try that with your pet detective?”

“No,” Lucifer denied. “I had her shoot me. And speaking of detectives, I’m going to need you to go help her catch Malcolm Graham. She’s being terribly slow about it.” 

“What? Why can’t you do it?” she frowned. 

“Because I need to have another chat with my brothers,” he grumbled back, as unhappy with his self-appointed assignment as Maze was with her new task. 

“Fine,” she conceded. “But you owe me, Lucifer.”

Well, Lucifer pouted, she at least seemed to have decided that this whole Linda mishap meant she was forgiven. 

🔥 ✨ 🔥 ✨ 😈✨ 🔥 ✨ 🔥

Maze entered the police precinct with raised brows. For someone trying to take a break from Hell, Lucifer sure had a penchant for finding places scarily reminiscent of their home right here on Earth. She wondered how the mortals would take it if she told them that there was an entire wing of torture chambers devoted to bureaucratic paperwork, damned souls chained to their chairs as they slogged through the same forms over and over and over. Dead police officers especially liked to torment themselves with paperwork for unsolved cases, or even better, with paperwork outlining their own corruption. 

And here was an entire workforce doing the same exact thing during their few short years on Earth. For such short-lived creatures, humans had an incredible talent for sucking the fun out of life. 

Maze spotted Decker diligently working through a pile of case folders at a desk towards the back of the room. She was one of the only women in the station, not that the mortal woman played into her femininity at all, what with her professionally staid ponytail, t-shirt, and a subdued leather jacket that not only covered all of her skin but also managed to obscure her curves. 

Even so, Maze could see her appeal. Besides being attractive, she also added an element of danger to Lucifer’s life, a novelty to a being that had spent eons as a virtually untouchable entity. Whether that ability to render Lucifer vulnerable would hold true now that the Devil had uncaged his power was doubtful, but Maze knew he had found it intriguing while it lasted. 

Maze was a little worried that he’d choose to lock his power back up after this whole catastrophe was solved just so he could bleed again, but that was a problem for another day. 

Shaking off her useless musings, the demon strolled over to Lucifer’s pet detective and plopped down in the mesh office chair beside Decker’s desk. 

The blonde woman was slow to react, her eyes dragging reluctantly away from her case file to look at her visitor, but when she finally did focus on Maze, her eyes widened in beautiful shock. 

“Mazikeen,” she greeted, voice heavy with befuddlement.

“Decker,” Maze nodded back, enjoying the detective’s confusion. “How’s your hunt for Malcolm Graham going? He kill anyone else yet?”

Chloe’s spine stiffened at the casual way Maze asked that question. She glanced around to make sure no one had overheard, then leaned in close to Maze and hissed, “What are you doing here?”

“I’ll take that as a no,” Maze rolled her eyes. “Lucifer said you refused to listen to Rhan, but you’ve had a whole day at this point. I would’ve thought he’d be locked up by now.”

“Rhan? You mean Lucifer’s _wolf_?”

“Hellhound,” the demon corrected.

“So not the point,” Chloe shook her head almost violently. “Seriously, what are you doing here?”

“I’m here to help you catch Malcolm,” Maze said, like it should be obvious. “Escaped souls from Hell are kind of in the job description.”

“Escaped souls from? Look, Mazikeen, I don’t need your help catching Malcom. _Not_ that we know he even did it, whatever Lucifer thinks his _hellhound_ said. Where is Lucifer, anyway? He’s not answering my calls.”

Maze released a very put upon sigh. “Well clearly you need my help, if you refuse to believe Rhan. Rhan’s never wrong about these things, you know.”

“He’s a dog,” Chloe shot back, staring at Maze like she thought the demon was the one having trouble comprehending the situation. 

Mortals, honestly. Maze pulled out one of her demon blades in a vaguely threatening gesture and started cleaning her nails with it. “Look Decker, I’m helping you on this one. So you can quit crying about it and wasting both our time, and fill me in on what you’ve got so far. Since you humans won’t accept Rhan’s word on the matter.”

“Or I could have you escorted out of the building,” Chloe pointed out.

“That didn’t work out for you when you were trying to get rid of Lucifer. What makes you think it will work with me?” Maze smirked. 

“Right, and speaking of Lucifer, I could really use _him_ for this case. So if you’re determined to help me, maybe you could get him here,” Chloe suggested, trying to suppress her frustration.

“No can do, Decker. Seems we’re stuck with each other on this one.”

“No? And what’s he doing that’s so important that he can’t be here instead of you?”

“Negotiating an alliance with a couple of archangels,” Maze said, much to Chloe’s consternation. 

“He’s hanging out with his brothers,” she reinterpreted Maze’s words, groaning. “You know what? Fine. Fine, I don’t even care.”

“Great!” Maze grinned. “Where do we start? I can have one of the hounds follow him. They can tell us if he does anything else homicidal. Or we could just go take him in now. Lucifer got me a new knee splitter a few months ago that I haven’t gotten to try out yet.” Seeing Chloe’s dropped jaw, Maze decided to switch tracks. “Or we can go for some less permanent methods, if you prefer. A nice hot poker would only leave small scars.”

“You can’t be serious,” Chloe whispered, looking a little green.

Maze nodded sympathetically and reached out to pat the detectives hand. “Don’t like blood? That’s okay. Going with pure psychological torture takes longer, but for an interrogation, it will result in more honesty. Good thinking, Decker.”

“I can’t believe I’m seriously having to say this, but Mazikeen? NO TORTURE. Here.” Chloe slid her copy of the case file over to Maze. “Read this, and try to think of ways we can prove Malcolm did it _without hurting anyone_. Okay?”

Maze’s gleeful expression dropped. She took the file and muttered, “You’re no fun at all, are you?”

Chloe didn’t bother to respond. Placing her head in her hands, she messaged her temples, fingers moving in rhythmic, soothing circles, and questioned all of her life choices up to this point. But despite her reservations, she was resigned to the crazy woman accompanying her on this case, if for no other reason than Mazikeen’s stubborn refusal to leave. 

God help her.


	5. Tap Dat

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Can we all just take a moment to appreciate how awesome season 4 was?! Already can’t wait for a season 5!
> 
> On another note, small snatches of dialogue between Lucifer and Amenadiel towards the beginning of this chapter are either directly lifted or heavily inspired by their fight at the end of S.1 Ep. 12. And the part at the end similarly draws from S.1.Ep.12.

“Decided you need our help after all, Brother?” Michael’s voice greeted Lucifer as soon as he stepped into the apartment that Amenadiel had been calling home while he stayed on Earth.

Lucifer took a moment to scan the room and nearly wrinkled his nose in exasperation at the stereotypical decorations his brother had chosen to surround himself with. Everything was white and airy. The wooden floors were a pale birch; the walls were painted ivory; and every stitch of fabric, from the sheets on the bed to the curtains covering the windows, were a soft cream. Even the dozens of candles hadn’t escaped the monochromatic horror. It was the kind of decor that would immediately make any human who saw it think: angel. But honestly the Silver City was filled with an abundance of color, so Lucifer didn’t really know why Amenadiel seemed determined to wrap himself up in a washed out cloud. 

“Hardly,” he finally answered Michael’s question, tossing a sneer at his three siblings before going back to fiddling with the candles. “I just figured, what with you so willing to fall on the sword of Mum’s wrath, that it would be silly of me to get in your way.”

Lucifer was careful to only address Michael when he spoke. Obscuring part of the truth was possible in Gabriel’s presence so long as one didn’t say anything false. But when the words were directed at the Archangel of Revelation, even lies by omission were impossible. It was the whole truth and nothing but the truth, and misdirects with the unvarnished, nothing-left-out truth were so difficult to pull off. 

Gabriel was the original reason Lucifer had developed the habit of never lying. Only later had honesty become a point of pride for him.

“For goodness’ sake Brother, have you no shame?” Amenadiel rumbled at him. 

With his back still turned, Lucifer turned his eyes skyward and silently asked his father why he hadn’t given the eldest seraphim a less overbearing personality. Par for the course, he received no response, but he felt better for having ranted at dear old Dad for a few seconds. “That’s rich coming from you, Amenadiel,” he said as he finally spun around to face the other three. 

“No, this isn’t my fault, Lucifer. It’s yours. It always has been,” Amenadiel glared at him, taking an aggressive step forward. The two archangels at his back did nothing to defuse the situation, silently watching the drama unfold in front of them. 

“Of course you’d say that,” Lucifer shook his head. “You remember Malcolm Graham? That mortal you resurrected from Hell? He’s killing humans now. A teenage girl, murdered. That’s on you,” he threw the accusation out, jabbing his finger at the muscle-bound angel in emphasis.

But of course Amenadiel couldn’t accept the criticism, not from Satan; he yelled and shoved the Devil back several steps. “If you’d just done what was asked of you, none of this would have happened and I’d still be home! Where I belong!” 

Only the fact that he’d come here with the express purpose of getting their help kept Lucifer from launching himself at his bald brother; Amenadiel was clearly spoiling for a fight, and usually Lucifer would be all for indulging him. But not today. “Heaven? Really? You sure that’s still home, eh? After all you’ve done?” he needled instead. “Sleeping with a demon. Oh? You two didn’t know about that one? Favorite bro not been completely honest? And they call _me_ the Deceiver.”

Amenadiel punched him. 

It was only as Lucifer straightened back up, wiping at his bloody lip and feeling morbidly triumphant, that his other brothers stirred from their stupor and chose to intervene. 

“Enough!” Michael ordered. “Amenadiel, I’ve already had this argument with Lucifer. We’ve got bigger things to worry about.”

“Yes,” Lucifer chuckled darkly just as Gabriel opened his mouth to speak. “Funny, isn’t it? How these things just keep repeating themselves over and over. You lot never do get any more original. But you’re right, Bother, we do have bigger problems. So maybe we could skip the obligatory throwdown this time?” 

Michael looked ready to retort, but Gabriel stepped forward and pushed him back with a gentle shove. Shooting a chastising look towards Amenadiel, he said, “Maybe I should do the talking? Since you two haven’t had much success not fighting when you’ve talked to Lucifer?”

“Ever the peacemaker, Gabriel,” Lucifer smiled, relaxing a bit with the assurance that his most easy-going brother would be acting as intermediary. 

“It’s more pleasant than conflict,” Gabriel agreed with a happy grin. 

Lucifer snorted. “Alright then, you said you’d help me with the Hell Beasts if I’d work with you on Mum?” he asked, careful not to phrase it as any kind of binding deal.

“Yep,” Gabriel chirped, then continued earnestly. “Not that we wouldn’t have wanted to help you catch the Hell Beasts even if Mum wasn’t, you know…”

“Threatening to destroy Earth?” Lucifer finished the thought dryly. He chose to ignore the platitude about helping with the Hell Beasts. He was sure Gabriel, at least, would have wanted to help out regardless, not that he actually would have without Father’s command. “Alright, we can team up as long as you all agree to one rule: absolutely no smiting the Hell Beasts.”

“Why?” Amenadiel piped up, and then as if asking the question had opened up the floodgates, he continued, seemingly unable to stop the flow of words. “Surely even you have to agree that those things are abominations! Why keep them locked up at all when you could destroy them? You should have exterminated them long ago.”

Lucifer grew more tense with every charge that dripped like poison off Amenadiel’s tongue. “Lot’s of reasons,” he spat back, “that I really don’t feel like getting into with you right now. Don’t throw around the mere existence of the Hell Beasts just so you can lay the blame at my feet, Amenadiel. We’re here because you screwed up!”

“Hey! Don’t—” Amenadiel started to respond, but Gabriel’s sharp whistle cut him off. 

“Guys, please,” he implored, shooting a quelling look at all of them. When they’d all settled down, he turned to face Lucifer with his hands held out in front of him in a placating gesture and said, “Lucifer, I know Amenadiel was…indelicate, but he did raise a valid question. Why can’t we smite them?”

The Devil sighed; time to see if Maze was right. “Smite a Hell Beast, and it’ll blow up like a giant human bomb. The things are causing enough destruction without us adding to the death toll.”

“Why would they explode?” Michael asked. “I’ve never heard of that happening when you smite a demon.”

“They’re not demons,” Lucifer sneered. “They’re Hell Beasts. Completely different, I assure you.”

“I’m surprised no regular demons took the opportunity to escape too,” Amenadiel commented. 

Lucifer rolled his eyes. “As I just said, Hell Beasts aren’t demons. Besides, I forbade possession years ago, and demons do generally prefer Hell. Though I’ll grant you the really stupid ones can’t tell the difference between here and a Hell loop.”

“Alright, what kind of numbers are we looking at. Do you know which ones escaped, what threat they each pose to humanity?” Michael asked, the commanding general of Heaven’s armies demanding a report. 

Lucifer almost bristled at the expectation in that tone. Even Mazikeen didn’t dare to command him when things were serious. But rolling the tension out of his shoulders, he opted not to comment. 

“Maze has locations on the 14 remaining lesser Hell Beasts,” he said, tone mild as he tossed them his demon’s initial report, marked up now with notations checking off the ones they had already returned to the Pits. “They won’t be much of a problem. We should be able to take them out in the next day or so. The real issue is the Deep Pitters, 16 of them. We are still working on finding them.”

“What’s the difference between a lesser Hell Beast and a Deep Pitter?” Gabriel asked.

“All Hell Beasts are formed from the worst aspects of my realm. They take their template from damned mortals. All their wants and desires are fashioned after the humans who end up in Hell. And just like every mortal soul that ends up in Hell, they long for Earth. And just like every mortal soul that actually manages to make it back to Earth, they bring Hell back with them. Hence all the literal and not-so-literal fires. They want to watch the world burn.

"The difference with the Hell Beasts that we keep locked in the Deep Pits, Brother, is that they’re clever…sapient in a way most of the other abominations aren’t. You can think of most Hell Beasts as just,” he paused, a wry smile pulling at his lips, “nearly indestructible rabid animals. But those from the Deep Pits, picture that mortal, Hitler, but take away any desire he had to rule over a successful empire and leave only his genocidal urges. That’s the Deep Pits.”

“And they’re smart enough to pull off that kind of death toll?” Michael pressed, trying to gain a clear picture of the danger.

“Worse, if we give them the chance to really get the ball rolling,” Lucifer grimaced. “Good news is that they’re all drained from crossing over right now, and any plans they have will necessarily take time. Bad news is that humans have invented things like nuclear bombs. So,” he perked up with false cheer, “let’s try not to let this escalate into an extinction event, yeah?”

“And then there’s Mum to consider,” Michael said, rubbing at his temples. “And who knows what she has planned.”

“As long as it’s not another flood,” Gabriel said, sounding hopeful. “She was mostly favoring plagues before Dad sent her to Hell, and humanity can at least recover from those.”

“Whatever she’s going to do, it can’t be anytime soon. Escaping will have cost her,” Lucifer pointed out.

“Which means she’ll be in a human body right now,” Amenadiel announced, realization brightening his eyes. 

“What makes you say that?” Lucifer asked. 

“Think about it,” Amenadiel grinned, words coming quick in his excitement. “If escaping cost her as much as you’re implying, she won’t have the power to resist Hell’s pull.”

“So she’ll need a human body to anchor herself to the Earthly plane,” Michael finished for him.

“Alright, so we need to find a human who recently almost died? That narrows it down some,” Gabriel nodded.

“Well let’s narrow it down even more,” Lucifer said. “She’ll be in a human who almost died in LA.” At the other three’s skeptical looks, he rolled his eyes and explained, “We all agree she’s coming to kill me. It’s n0t like she couldn’t sense which city I’m in before hopping into a body.”

“Point. Okay then. Amenadiel? You’re in charge of compiling those records to find Mum. Nobody confronts a potential hit alone though, deal? Gabriel, you and I are going to work on adding protections to vulnerable points in the human’s infrastructure. Wards on nuclear bombs, protections against mind control on major world leaders and the like. Lucifer—”

“Yes?” Lucifer drawled sarcastically. “Tell me, Brother, what is my task to be?”

Michael huffed but carried on without otherwise acknowledging Lucifer’s attitude. “You need to locate the Deep Pitters. First thing though when we leave here, we need to finish off the remaining lesser Hell Beasts. They’re causing the most direct destruction at the moment, so getting rid of them needs to be the first priority.”

“So we’re going on a hunt?” Amenadiel asked and feral grins spread across all four brothers faces. 

“Just let me call my demon then,” Lucifer said and pulled out his phone. The other three’s smiles dimmed a bit at that, but none of them protested. “She’d hate to miss it.”

🔥 ✨ 🔥 ✨ 😈✨ 🔥 ✨ 🔥

“You believe me now, Decker?”

“Look, Maze, I’ll admit it’s suspicious. But none of it ties Malcolm to the satanic killings.”

“He spent all his money,” Maze huffed, waiving the corrupt cop’s financial records in Chloe’s face.

“Not exactly murder,” the detective pointed out. 

“He tried to shoot Lucifer! And he was talked out of it because Lucifer gave him a _pentecostal_ coin.”

“A crime in and of itself,” she conceded. “And I don’t know how Lucifer knew a creepy coin would save him, but still not anything that links him to these specific murders.”

“Do you even know what a pentecostal coin does?”

“No, Maze, what does a pentecostal coin do?” Chloe asked with the air of someone indulging a child.

“It’s a ticket out of Hell,” Maze growled, equally exasperated.

“So it’s a very strong satanic symbol. But Maze, there are lots of satanists in LA. Observing an atypical religion doesn’t equal murder.”

“Lucifer gives him that coin and suddenly Malcolm goes from wanting to kill him to being all buddy-buddy? And you don’t think that’s linked to your kid Corazon dying the next day with the word ‘Morningstar’ marking the site? Not the most common reference to the Devil, but one that points towards LA’s fancy club owner?”

“No! Because that would be insane,” Chloe stressed, reiterating that fact for what felt like the hundredth time. 

“Of course it’s insane,” Maze scoffed. 

Chloe closed her eyes, praying for patience. “What’s his motive, then? He’s suddenly converted to satanism so he’s decided to go out and murder a bunch of fellow satanists?”

“Decker, imagine just for a second that you’re Malcolm. You died and literally went to Hell and back, and you believe that Lucifer’s the Devil. And then Lucifer turned around and gave you a way to stay out of Hell. What might you do to try and make the Devil happy, to show him that you worship him, after all that?”

“Yeah, except Lucifer would never want someone to murder in his name.”

“But does Malcolm know that? Lucifer doesn’t exactly have the best PR among humans.”

“It’s a good story, but it’s still completely circumstantial. You probably couldn’t even get him indicted on that.”

“So let’s go get a confession,” Maze nearly begged. This whole thing was so boring. Seriously, how did Lucifer enjoy this investigating schtick so much? If it involved more chasing and fighting criminals she could understand, but so far all she’d gotten to do was sift through paper records and argue. “I’ve been thinking about how to get him to talk without breaking your whole ‘no torture’ rule, and I think all we need to do is set the hounds on him! He’ll squeal in seconds.”

Chloe’s head thunked down on her desk. “Threatening violence is off the table too, Maze.”

“So we don’t threaten him,” Maze shrugged. “Rhan, Aza, and Zeev will just circle him and growl while we ask questions.”

“That’s called intimidation, and it’s still illegal.”

Maze grit her teeth and threw out her final hail Mary. “Then I’m going to invite him to Lux. I can wear a wire or something like they do in all those TV shows. If it’s just me, I can get him to talk.”

Chloe was silent for a long moment as she thought it over. “Actually, that could work. If his delusions are what you think they are, then maybe talking to a ‘demon’ without any police around might loosen his tongue. But Maze, this is very important, you can’t threaten him at all. No saying you or the hounds or Lucifer will go after him if he doesn’t confess. No saying you are going to steal the coin if he doesn’t confess. No hounds growling at him.”

After a moment’s thought she also tacked on, “Or having sex with him. It needs to be just a conversation. Give him the opportunity to talk; don’t force him. We don’t want him to have any case for entrapment, okay?”

“I got this, Decker,” Maze smirked. Finally, something interesting to do. 

🔥 ✨ 🔥 ✨ 😈✨ 🔥 ✨ 🔥

A few hours later they had all of the surveillance equipment set up in Lucifer’s penthouse and Maze was down at the bar, wired up and waiting for her prey. 

“You can’t seriously think Malcolm had anything to do with these murders, Chloe,” Dan muttered from his seat beside her. 

“I know it’s all really circumstantial, but I don’t know, I have a gut feeling about this. I can’t believe it, but I do think he did it.”

“A gut feeling? Really?” Dan scoffed. “If he doesn’t confess Chloe, this is going to look really bad for you. You realize that, right?”

She looked away, and when she answered her voice was quiet, an odd mix of uncertainty and conviction. “You know I don’t believe Paolucci’s death was a suicide. And now all of this? There’s something rotten going on, Dan.”

“Malcolm Graham, welcome to the Devil’s lair,” Mazikeen’s voice sounding over the wire halted their conversation. At this time of day, the club was completely empty, so only the low thrum of background music interfered with the recorded conversation, an easily ignorable noise. 

Down at the bar Maze watched in amusement as Malcolm’s eyes scanned over her, caught somewhere between suspicious and deeply lustful. “And where is the Devil,” he asked after he finished his perusal. 

“Out,” she grinned, sharklike. “It’s just you and me this time.”

He swallowed. “And who are you?”

“Mazikeen,” she introduced herself with no further explanation.

“To him, I mean,” Malcolm clarified right on script. 

“Hmmm, so many things: bartender, lover, protector, demon consort. Take your pick.”

“Wait, they’re married,” Maze heard Detective Espinoza’s voice whisper in her earpiece, followed by Decker hushing him. 

“Why’d you ask to meet with me?” Malcolm asked, appearing apprehensive but flushed with excitement. 

“Drink?” she asked, then poured him a whiskey without waiting for a response. “Lucifer heard about those satanic killings.”

“Yeah, he wasn’t at the last crime scene though,” Malcolm sighed. And oh, this was too easy. The poor human actually looked disappointed. 

“Yes, he’s been very busy lately, but he did want me to look into it for him.”

“He did?” Malcolm perked up a bit.

“Oh yes,” she smiled. “Somebody’s clearly trying to pay tribute to him. And he wanted to know all about it.”

“Exactly! It’s a tribute! Some of those other cops, they actually think Lucifer did it, you know? But not me! I know he didn’t do it. I just want you to know, you and Lucifer both to know, I respect the Hell outa him. Get it? Hell?” He gave a deranged little laugh and held his hand up for a high-five. “Up top.”

Maze eyed the man’s fingers, and just as he was starting to look uncertain, she commented, “You’ve got red paint on your hand. Just like the paint that was at the warehouse.”

“Oh,” he pulled his hand back and started to wipe it off against his pants leg. “I must have gotten it on me at the scene.”

“You weren’t wearing gloves? Isn’t that police protocol or something? They always have gloves in the movies.” 

Malcolm locked eyes with her and his nervousness slowly dropped away in favor of a smile. “Oh man! You caught me! Literally red handed! Oh, I was wondering if you’d figured it out. I been dyin’ all day to tell Lucifer. You’ll tell him for me, won’t you?”

“You killed those people?” Maze asked, trying to make sure the recording had a very clear confession. This kind of thing wasn’t her preferred method of dealing with things, but let it never be said that she wasn’t competent enough to pull it off.

“You mean those frauds? Yeah. Do you think Lucifer’ll be impressed?”

“He’ll be something, alright,” Maze purred, picturing all the wonderful ways Lucifer would punish this cretin in Hell. “And the police think Lucifer did it?” she asked, honestly curious how this idiot could think Lucifer would be pleased by that even if he was the type of Devil depicted in human religion. 

“If you’re worried, I’ve got the perfect person to pin it on!”

“Already got someone picked out to frame for the murders of Rose Davis and Corazon? Well, aren’t you a prepared little boy scout.”

“The street preacher! The one I had to drag outa the first crime scene, ya know? Genius right? That guys crazy, and I already dropped some evidence so,” he sighed, a contented, eager look on his face. 

Decker chose that exact moment to enter the room and arrest him, an easy feat after Maze took the opportunity to wrestle the deranged cop’s weapon from him. And Maze had to admit, Decker did look hot cuffing the man. Now that she'd decided not to kill the detective, Maze hoped Lucifer had more luck seducing her in the future. That would be fun to watch. 

Maze’s phone dinged, drawing her attention away from the lady cop, and she pulled it out to see a message from Lucifer: 😇➡️🤺👻🙏🏼👫🤯. “My brothers and I are going to fight the rest of the lesser Hell Beasts. Please join me before I go crazy,” she interpreted. 

“Well, looks like my work here is done,” Maze announced to the surrounding police officers and headed for the door without a backwards glance. Sometimes, Lucifer’s timing was impeccable.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So I actually wrote 2 full chapters and several scenes for later in this story while working on this chapter. Inspiration kept hitting me, but it was all for stuff on down the road. Point being, sorry for the slight delay, but I do know exactly where I want to take this story now. So yay, this is no longer a "half-baked idea" so much as a work in progress:)


	6. Hello Mum, Long Time No Betray

“‘Sup losers,” Maze called as she jumped out of her souped up (and armored, though Lucifer had at least insisted she go a little subtle on that point) black SUV, Rhan and Zeev trundling down after her with wolfish grins. Both hounds bounded forward immediately when they caught sight of Lucifer, tails wagging joyously at being reunited with their master after the long separation. 

They’d split up a mere five hours ago figuring the task would go faster if each celestial engaged in their own hunt, and Lucifer had insisted Maze take the two hellhounds with her, more concerned with her having someone trustworthy watching her back than he was with increasing his brothers’ efficiency tracking the beasts. 

“Hey boys,” Lucifer bent down to greet them even as Aza rushed from his side to pounce on Maze. He’d tried to get her to stop letting Aza jump on her like that, but his demon seemed to like the almost violent affection, so he’d long given it up as a lost cause. 

Once the dogs had finally settled down, Lucifer looked up at Maze and announced, “I do believe I won this round.” 

She narrowed her eyes. “How many’d you get?”

“Six,” he smirked, smugness radiating off of him like a tangible thing. “And before you ask how I know you didn’t get more, I’ll tell you that my brothers caught six between them. Well, mostly Michael, but still. That leaves only two for you.”

“It wasn’t a competition, Brother,” Michael grumbled from his spot on the other side of the private garage where he was standing guard over his four Hell Beasts, each of which was cut up into a bevy of small, twitching pieces rather than resembling anything like an actual creature. 

“Says the first loser,” Lucifer rejoined, tilting his chin up in a superior expression before turning his attention back to Maze. “You got the worms?” 

“Yes,” she grimaced and walked around to open the hatch to her trunk, yanking two writhing, pink, fleshy masses onto the concrete at her feet. 

As they were at the moment, the Hell Beasts were only vaguely scary, at least to the immortals’ eyes. They were sightless tubes of pure muscle with gaping mouths at one end that opened into an orifice filled with concentric circles of dagger-like teeth. Stretched out, each worm was probably about twelve feet long and as thick as a typical human torso, but they kept twisting back in on themselves, which made them appear smaller.

They were much more terrifying when free. These particular abominations were tunnelers. They had a voracious appetite, eating their way through anything solid to carve out underground pathways; the more they consumed, the larger they grew. The only reason they were contained in this small shape at the moment were the numerous Hell Chains wrapped tightly around their bodies and stuffing up their mouths to keep them from eating. The Hell-forged bindings could neutralize the majority of even an archangel’s power, so they had no trouble knocking the worms into a more manageable size. 

“I think I should get extra points for catching them,” Maze said. She cocked her head to the side, staring down at the worms, then reared backed and kicked one harshly in the side, drawing an inhuman, chittering scream from the thing. “They were the size of a subway train by the time I found them.” 

“Had they caused much damage?” Lucifer asked, tone dropping its teasing lilt.

“A couple of collapsed apartment buildings out in Pasadena, and I’m sure their sewage and water lines are shot to Hell too. They’ll be real freaked when they go to investigate and find giant holes cutting through the ground. The worms were heading towards the CalTech campus when I got there.”

He spared a moment to feel pity for the humans who must have died when their home collapsed before shoving it down to churn with the impotent rage and unacknowledged guilt festering in a locked-away corner of his mind over this whole situation. There was nothing to be done now except clean the mess up.

“Sounds like you got there in the nick of time,” he said, pulling a smile onto his face. 

“Yeah I did, and they were a damn sight more dangerous than your little volcanic gorillas,” Maze lightly mocked, raising her brows towards the five snarling great apes that looked like they were crafted from half-cooled lava. 

“Those grow too,” Lucifer protested.

“Not as fast as the worms,” she singsonged back. 

He laughed. “Give it up, darling. I’ve already won.”

She cast her eyes over him, then glanced at his final catch and smirked. “See you caught the black widow. Bet that was _fun_.”

“Wouldn’t be the first time a partner’s tried to eat me mid-coitus,” he muttered sardonically. “But no, I didn’t grace the little beastie with that pleasure before I captured her.”

“Pity,” Maze joked with a teasing leer. 

“Okay,” Gabriel broke in, clapping his hand down on Lucifer’s shoulder. “If you two are done flirting, maybe you could drag these things back to Hell, Luci?”

“Oh very well,” Lucifer agreed with a sigh. “Mazikeen, darling, why don’t you and my brothers grab a celebratory drink up in my penthouse? I’ll join you in a few minutes.”

He didn’t wait for his siblings to consent, trusting Maze to keep them around until he made it back from Hell. Chains in hand, he circled the ceiling of the garage once and dove straight through the floor, all fourteen Hell Beasts trailing after him wailing in protest. 

🔥 ✨ 🔥 ✨ 😈✨ 🔥 ✨ 🔥

Bael greeted him as he was handing off his quarry to the Pit Guard with the news that the accounting of the Hell Beasts had been completed, so Lucifer flew his duke back to his palace to go over the report. 

They touched down at the main entrance, and Lucifer took a moment to appreciate Pandemonium’s architecture. It was a towering structure arching across two separate islands at the center of one one of Hell’s largest volcanoes. The only way to reach it was to either fly or brave the treacherously narrow rock path across the molten lake, and dragons frolicked in the magma, glittering like gems in every color of the rainbow, their beauty deceiving nobody as to their vicious nature. 

Beautiful but deadly was a theme with his abode. The surrounding pool of lava cast a flickering glow on the black obsidian of the palace walls, giving the entire building the appearance of a glowing ember, the effect all the more arresting for the lack of drifting ash in this section of Hell.

Turning away from the sight, Lucifer led Bael through the palace halls towards his private wing, nodding small acknowledgements to the occasional noble-demon. All of his dukes were out overseeing their sections of Hell at the moment, but lesser nobles often loitered around the palace in the hopes of catching his attention, even when he was gone on an extended vacation it seemed. 

Once they made it to his private office, he poured them both a healthy glass of bourbon (never let it be said demons in Hell couldn’t be industrious when it came to producing products their lord took pleasure in, even if the drink was technically only a facsimile), and flopped down on his leather couch. “So which Deep Pitters am I hunting?” he asked, slipping easily into Lilim, the language of the archdemons. 

Bael accepted his glass and handed Lucifer a thick report as he settled next to the Devil. Lucifer flipped to the section naming the Deep Pitters currently on Earth, opting to save reviewing the damage that had been caused by Hell Beasts who hadn’t escaped Hell for later. He scanned the list quickly, then dropped his head back against the back of the couch with a frustrated groan. 

“I know it’s not good news,” Bael started.

“Understatement,” Lucifer muttered.

“But you seem…more disquieted than I would have expected?” 

Head still leaned back, Lucifer glanced at Bael out of the corner of his eye, noting the demon’s open, earnest expression. It was one of the reasons he liked Bael so much: the sometimes-cat-faced male was unusually sensitive for a demon, which probably also played into his frequent bouts of anxiety. 

On the rare occasions he ventured from his post at the Pits to play with the damned mortal souls, Bael tended to favor emotional torment, and over the years he’d grown highly perceptive at sussing out Lucifer’s own moods. He was also willing to indulge his king, at least somewhat, when Lucifer needed softer companionship. 

“We still haven’t located my mum,” Lucifer confided after a moment’s contemplation. “Tell me, Bael, you’ve been in charge of her prison since she arrived. How many times do you think she’s going to kill me before she tries to trap me in a cage of my own?”

“I don’t know,” Bael solemnly confessed. “She only spoke once, in all the time she was here.”

“Oh? And what did she say?”

Bael shrugged and stated matter-of-factly, “She asked for you. But you’d told me you wouldn’t interfere, so I refused her request. And no matter what Mazikeen did to her after that, she never said another word.”

They both fell quiet then, sipping at their drinks to the ever-present tune of crackling fire, the palace’s constant companion thanks to the lake of lava surrounding its islands. 

“She did nothing when I was cast out of Heaven,” Lucifer eventually broke the silence. “She just stood by and watched as Michael, always the good little soldier boy, followed Dad’s orders.” It was an old wound, as was everything connected to his Fall, and he’d had millennia for the initial sharp pain of betrayal to settle into a more lingering resentment. But still… “So when Dad sent her to be locked up down here, I did the same thing: nothing. After all, what could she possibly have said to justify what she’d done?

“Only now she’s free, potentially planning to kill me at least once, and I can’t help but to wonder what she might have said if I’d gone to see her.”

Lucifer sat up then and twisted to stare down at Bael directly in the eye, his own eyes burning with barely banked flames. “Next time an important prisoner requests my presence, Bael, do not assume what my answer will be.”

Bael didn’t quite shrink back in the face of Lucifer’s anger, but he did bare his throat submissively in silent acknowledgement of the reprimand. Lucifer nodded, satisfied that the message had been received, and stood up.

“Well, seems it’s time for me to head back to Earth. Hopefully I’ll see you again soon with another fresh catch,” he said as he finished the remainder of his drink with a grimace. 

🔥 ✨ 🔥 ✨ 😈✨ 🔥 ✨ 🔥 

Maze bounced over to Lucifer’s bar, a cheerful swing in her hips. “A toast,” she gloated, “to finally catching the last of the lesser Hell Beasts.”

The three angels all accepted their drinks while they waited for Lucifer to come back from Hell, an air of accomplishment drifting through the room. And then Lucifer flapped back into the penthouse with a scowl on his face.

“Pour me one, would you?” he grumbled, dropping gracelessly onto one of his barstools. 

Maze eyed him warily. “What’s happened now?”

Lucifer knocked back the glass she handed him in two large gulps and motioned for her to refill it before answering. “Bael’s finally finished cataloguing exactly which Hell Beasts escaped, and of all the bloody Deep Pitters to have gotten out, one of them had to be Echidna.”

“You’re kidding,” Maze groaned and dropped her head down on the bar. “So much for my toast.”

“What toast?” Lucifer asked.

“Ahem,” Gabriel spoke up before Maze could explain, raising his hand like a schoolboy waiting to be acknowledged. “Perhaps you could explain for the rest of us? Who or what is Echidna?”

“A nasty piece of work,” Maze muttered. One that the Heavenly Host had left them to deal with alone last time Echidna had escaped to wreak havoc on Greece. Barely a year topside, and the humans were still telling stories about her. 

Lucifer quirked his lips in a small smile, knowing exactly what had caused her sudden annoyance with his siblings, then turned to his brothers and said, “A nasty piece of work.” 

He let the words hang there for a moment, just long enough to see irritation start to creep into each of his brothers’ eyes, before continuing. “Half snake, half disturbingly hot woman, and the so-called Mother of Monsters. If she’s up here then we’re not quite as done with the lesser Hell Beasts as we thought. Once she’s recovered, she’ll just keep popping new ones out.”

“Lovely,” Amenadiel snorted.

“So I take it we should move finding her towards the top of our priority list?” Michael more stated than asked, but Lucifer opted to treat it like a question anyways.

“Right to the number one slot, I’d say, if we want to keep the numbers manageable.”

Michael nodded solemnly, noting that this new information didn’t change the general plan. Lucifer was still in charge of tracking the Hell Beasts, and he promptly assigned Maze the task of locating Echidna. With that decided, the others drifted out of Lucifer’s penthouse, his brothers off to Dad only knew where while his demon went down to the club to enjoy spot of late-night revelry. 

Not inclined to party himself, Lucifer instead meandered over to his piano. He tossed his jacket onto the bar, a smooth navy line against the glass surface, and rolled his shirtsleeves up and unbuttoned his collar for comfort. Then he grabbed a decanter of bourbon and a crystal tumbler and, ensemble complete, slid onto the piano bench, running his fingers almost reverently along the ivory keys, feeling their weight and smooth texture as he began to slowly pluck out a melody.

In a slow lilt that didn’t much resemble the hard-hitting notes of the original version of the rock song, Lucifer started to sing, “Risin’ up, back on the street. Did my time, took my chances. Went the distance, now I’m back on my feet. Just a man and his will to survive…So many times, it happens too fast, you trade your passion for glory. Don’t lose your grip on the dreams of the past. You must fight just to keep them alive!”

And on he played, sometimes singing, sometimes letting his fingers carry the music. He didn’t know how long he’d been at it when the elevator dinged behind him, a pain-filled gasp of his name interrupting an amusing rendition of Elvis’s ‘(You’re the) Devil in Disguise.’

He twisted around, halfway to standing before he’d registered the desire to move, caught somewhere between confusion and budding concern that a Deep Pitter had gotten the jump on Maze, only to come up short at the sight of a complete stranger. She had long auburn hair framing a beautiful face, and her business clothes, disheveled and bloody as they were, did nothing to disguise her shapely body. A thought which disturbed him a second later as his senses picked up a familiar if severely diminished aura. 

“Mum?” he asked, alarm shooting adrenalin straight to his heart. 

“Lucifer,” she gasped out his name for a second time, taking a staggering step towards him. “Help me!”

She reached her hand out to him as her knees buckled, but he didn’t go to her. He scrambled back, retreating to his living room to snatch up his sword from where he’d tossed it on the couch when he’d returned from Hell. Armed, he stepped back around his piano to observe his mother, sword held loose and at the ready.

She was collapsed on the floor, panting, with no weapon in sight. Her tight pencil skirt and blouse didn’t exactly leave much room to conceal a knife either, not that he trusted that assessment. He’d spent too many years with Maze, who could still sometimes shock him with a dagger despite her scant clothing, to believe his mother was as helpless as she appeared. 

But still, she was occupying a mortal shell, her divine power a barely flickering light, so weak he’d almost take her to be a human witch were he not so familiar with her. And it was impossible to bring anything with you when possessing another body, so unless she’d somehow managed to overpower Maze or one of his brothers, she wouldn’t have access to any blades that could hurt him. 

Wounded bird was only a good strategy if she had something to strike him with when he came near. With neither power nor weapon, it didn’t make sense for her to come for him now, in this manner. She should be holed up somewhere recuperating. Unless she intended to recover with his help and stab him in the back later.

“Lucifer?” She peered up at him, eyes locked nervously on his black sword. “What are you doing?”

“Hello, Mum,” he finally greeted her, grip tightening on the hilt of his sword. “Long time, no betray.”


	7. The Unforgiven

“Betray?” His mum appeared bizarrely shocked by the word.

Lucifer shrugged. “If the soul reflects,” he said, the angelic equivalent to the modern human idiom, ‘If the shoe fits.’

She narrowed her eyes, then apparently opted to flip the conversation around on him. 

“Son, I know it was your father who had me locked up in Hell. I don’t blame you for that any more than I blame your siblings for shepherding me down there. No, not even for lending your energy to power the locks,” she reassured after accurately reading the disbelief in his expression. “You were all just obeying orders, I know that. Though you could have at least visited me.”

“Like you did for me?” Lucifer scoffed, simultaneously offended by the notion that he would ever blindly obey his father again and the fact that she believed she deserved such consideration from him. 

“So that’s what this is about? You’re mad that I didn’t come see you in Hell?” Somehow she still managed to sound haughty despite the fact that she was sweaty, covered in blood, and kneeling on the floor at sword point. 

“Well goodness, you don’t call, you don’t visit, what’s a son to think? But hey! What’s a few thousand millennia between family, am I right? Especially after you stood by and let me be cast out in the first place. Trust me, Mum, I’m way past mad by now.”

“Stood by? Just because my conversations with your father were held in private—”

“You did nothing!"

“And what would you have had me do?” she shouted back, struggling to her feet. “You started a rebellion, Lucifer! I may not have been thrilled with your punishment, but—”

“Yes, the true original sin! I rebelled! Because Heaven forbid your children think for themselves! The famous celestial war…No one even died!”

“That’s only a technicality, and you know it, Son.”

Lucifer rolled his eyes, long habit allowing him to easily shove his regret away. “I didn’t think you cared about the lower orders.”

“They’re still angels, Lucifer. My grandchildren and great-grandchildren.”

“And on down the line?”

“Yes! And you know full well that they aren’t capable of reforming completely after they die. Their souls are no better off than all those silly human souls polluting the Silver City now!”

Like he needed the reminder of what his war had cost. It may take a while, and it may be painful, but archangels and those directly created by God and Goddess would eventually regrow as good as new. The millions of others…wouldn’t. 

Snakes writhed in his stomach and Lucifer took an aggressive step forward, his eyes flashing red with hellfire. 

“So they lost their power, they’re still in Heaven! Even those who joined me in rebellion are still there.”

“Demoted,” she pointed out, mostly unfazed by his show of temper.

“I’m the only one who was cast out, though, wasn’t I?” He jabbed his sword at her carelessly in emphasis, darkly satisfied when she retreated a step. “I may have been the one who led the fight, but I was hardly the only one who thought we needed change.”

“Like I said,” she pursed her lips, giving him a chastising look, “I wasn’t thrilled with your punishment. I didn’t think we should break up the family. But you’re an archangel, Son.”

“The privileges of rank.” He turned his face away, eyes focussed on his blade as he spun it round and round in his hand, soothed by the whistling hiss it made as it cut through the air.

“You’re too powerful to punish the same way those who followed you were punished,” she said, stating the obvious. “And none of the other options your father was considering were any better than Hell. At least this way you became a king!”

“Beelzebub,” Lucifer sneered. “Literally translates as ‘Lord of Flies,’ the ‘god of filth.’ If you were aiming to give me a crown, Mum, you certainly bestowed an illustrious one.”

She stared at him, expression placid, until he relaxed his stance. Then she took a cautious step forward, hand held out beseechingly. “Put the sword down, Son. I’m not here to fight with you.”

“Afraid I can’t do that,” he said and moved to place the tip of his blade ever so delicately against the fragile skin of her human throat.

She blinked. “Why?”

“Why? Well because I have to take you back to Hell.”

“I’m your mother.”

“Yes.” He drew the word out exaggeratedly, the sarcastic ‘And?’ unvoiced but heard nonetheless. 

“You can’t put me back in that cage.”

“I assure you, I can.”

She stepped towards him then, heedless of the shallow cut that sliced into her neck at the motion, and smiled when Lucifer instinctively jerked his hand back to avoid injuring her further. “Son, it’s broken. It couldn’t contain a fairy now, let alone me.”

“The locks are already being repaired, Mum. Enough of them are fixed that, weak as you are now, they’d hold you.”

“Ah, but I didn’t just break the locks, I broke the whole cage.” She grinned smugly when his eyes widened in alarm. “You didn’t really think I’d leave my freedom to chance, did you?”

Lucifer stood frozen. For a brief second he wondered how his demons could have missed this before he dismissed the thought. The locks were shattered and Hell was in chaos; there was no reason for anyone to enter the infernal labyrinth that was his mother’s cell. The locks may have kept the entrance closed, but the reality bending interior of the cage, with its ability to confuse and disorient a person until they didn’t know which way was up and which way was down, was far more effective at keeping its prisoner trapped than any door could ever be. 

“Well played,” he muttered, sheathing his weapon.

She smirked and walked around him to sit on his couch, but before she could lower herself onto the cushions he stopped her, not about to let anyone, especially a member of his family, sit on his Italian leather sofa in bloody clothes. He tossed a clean button-down shirt and a pair of black silk boxers at her, the best options he could come up with on a moments notice, and ordered her to take a shower, then snatched the decanter off his piano and chugged the remaining whiskey. 

It took several more hours of discussion and a quick trip across town to the the sight of his mother’s mortal shell’s murder for Lucifer to become relatively convinced of her good intentions. Not that he intended to leave her alone regardless, but with nowhere to cage her, he figured it was best to avoid violence (hopefully in the future as well) by acting the part of a hospitable host. 

Maze was informed of the situation, but she had more important tasks than guarding his de-powered mother, as did Michael and Gabriel. But Amenadiel’s assignment was defunct now, so Lucifer called him to his penthouse with a quick prayer. A couple of threats of dismembership should his brother attempt to tote their mum back to Hell later and Lucifer was on his way to the precinct, happy to leave the other two to their reconciliation. 

He was sure he was in for a tedious lecture from Michael at some point, but he couldn’t bring himself to care. It had been a long, sleepless night, and he wanted something less cosmic to entertain himself with at the moment. 

He strolled up to Chloe’s workstation half an hour later and was displeased to note the early morning sun casting shadows over an empty desk. Ignoring the wary looks being thrown at him from the other officers, most likely thanks to Aza’s massive body settled docilely at his side, he sat down in the Detective’s chair to wait. 

The case file on her computer was open to the case they'd been working before Malcolm Graham’s satanic killings. It was the murder of a nine year old girl. Brown hair, brown eyes, innocent, and far too similar to Beatrice for the lieutenant to have assigned the investigation to the Detective. 

Last he knew, they’d arrested an Iosif Sokolov. Middle-aged and greying with a slight beer gut, the man was utterly unremarkable aside from his perverse inclination for young girls. In a rare opportunity to demonstrate his skill as a polyglot, Lucifer had conducted the entire interrogation in Russian, but much as he’d enjoyed the general admiration of the precinct and Chloe specifically, he’d been frustratingly unable to wrangle a confession from the man. 

Iosif only admitted to molesting their murder victim’s best friend after he was confronted with her sworn statement accusing him, but he’d held fast to his proclamations of innocence in the face of the murder charges. The man had no hidden desire to confess. His greatest wish was to walk away free, and Lucifer couldn’t draw out what wasn’t there.

It looked like the detective was taking another crack at him though. The file noted that Iosif had been brought up to interrogation room three about two hours ago, so maybe that’s where he’d find Chloe. 

“Lucifer?” Her voiced sounded behind him right at that moment.

Lucifer reacted on instinct more than anything, reaching out and grabbing Aza by the scruff of her neck almost as soon as the dog moved. “No, Aza! We don’t jump on humans!”

Aza settled back into a sitting position and looked up at him with wide maroon eyes, a plaintive whine building in her throat. 

“Yes, I know the Detective is our favorite, but that doesn’t mean she wants to be bear hugged every time you see her.”

Aza nudged his hand in complaint, then ducked her head in a quick, questioning nod.

“Well because she’s not Maze!” he responded, exasperated. “Humans generally take a gentler touch.”

The dog leaned forward and licked his fingers then cocked her head to the side inquisitively. 

“Yes, that should be fine,” he agreed and waved her towards the detective. 

Aza immediately moved to sit in front of Chloe, nearly vibrating with happiness. Her tail wagged hopefully while she stared up at the blonde woman. The detective glanced uncertainly at Lucifer, and he gestured for her to hold her hand out with an encouraging smile. Obeying the silent instruction, she held her palm out for the hound to sniff, grinning a little when Aza licked her fingers. 

“Dude, that’s freaky,” Dan commented from his spot at his desk several feet way. 

“And awesome!” Ella exclaimed as she walked out of the lab before Lucifer had a chance to respond to the Douche. “Man, do you enter them in any dog shows? I bet they’d kill it at the obedience competition!”

“I prefer to play obedience games with people.” He winked at the detective, delighting in the way her nose scrunched up and the deep flush that immediately rose in her cheeks. “Besides, the hounds are hunting dogs, not show ponies.”

“You hunt?” The Douche looked insultingly skeptical at the idea. 

Lucifer tugged at his cufflinks with a sniff, realigning them so the ruby-eyed snakes both pointed towards his hands. “Of course I do. Haven’t you ever heard of the Wild Hunt?”

After several seconds of silence, he looked up from examining his clothes and noticed the disbelieving stares of the other three. “What?”

“Sorry, just didn’t take you for the…outdoorsy type,” Ella clarified for them. 

“Outdoorsy?” Lucifer raised his brows in surprise. The Wild Hunt was primal, sure, but the heated rush of the chase as his legions swept over the land with all the unstoppable force of a tsunami bore little resemblance to those images he’d seen of men dressed in camouflage perched in trees for hours on end. The Hunt would be just as at home in the middle of an urban jungle as a rainforest. “No, nature’s much more my sister’s schtick.” 

Daniel shook his head, expression screwed up in an expression that almost had Lucifer warning him about premature wrinkling; Ella opened her mouth as if to speak, but no words were forthcoming. Chloe opted to just grab his hand and drag him off towards the interrogation rooms with Aza trotting at their heels, effectively ending the conversation.

They entered the observation room and the door swung shut behind them with a resounding bang. Chloe took several deep breaths like she was steeling herself for something. Her fingers remained firmly wrapped around his hand. Glancing down, Lucifer noticed that her knuckles were white and bloodless from the strength of her grip, and he wondered if the lack of pain on his end was confirmation that unlocking his power had nullified his physical vulnerability around the detective. 

On the other side of the one-way glass, Lucifer could see Iosif Sokolov. He was dressed in a washed-out grey jumpsuit. His hands were handcuffed to the table in front of him, and his hair hung in greasy, unkempt strands over his forehead.

He was gazing straight at the glass, smiling like the cat that ate the canary. 

“Lucifer?” Chloe’s eyes shifted back and forth between her partner and Iosif. She wouldn’t quite meet Lucifer’s eyes even when he tried to tilt her face towards him with a gentle hand on her jaw. 

“Detective?” he drawled when she failed to say anything else after nearly a full minute.

She huffed and squared her shoulders. “That guy's guilty.”

“Yes, he is,” Lucifer agreed with a slow nod.

“He still hasn’t confessed.”

“I know.” 

“God, but the way he talks about it! That smarmy, self-satisfied look on his face! He’s guilty as _sin_ , and the only thing we can tie to him, definitively, is molesting little Aubrey.” She paused, drawing in a deep, shuddering breath. “He’s guilty, and he’s going to get away with murdering Lucy.”

“Detective…”

“Killing a child, Lucifer. A nine-year-old girl.”

“I know.” He felt like he was on repeat, but he didn’t know what else she wanted from him.

“A couple of years in prison, and he’ll be right back out on the streets. That’s not justice.”

“Detective, I promise you, if he doesn’t pay for it in this life, he will when he’s dead.”

“That’s not good enough. It’s not.” Her shoulders hunched forward with defeat. It was times like these, when he could see the heartbreak written in every inch of her frame, that Lucifer most wished she would believe him when he said he was the Devil. 

“I assure you, eternal damnation is exactly as horrible as it sounds.”

“I don’t care if he’s going to burn in Hell for the next ten billion years!” She rounded on him, meeting his eyes for the first time since they entered the room. “It’s. Not. Good. Enough,” she said, each word falling off her tongue like a hammer striking an anvil. “That little girl is _dead_. He shouldn’t get to live out the rest of his life free when he _stole_ her life from her.”

They both went quiet. Lucifer just watched her, watched as she took exactly ten deep breaths, in through the nose, out through the mouth, her eyes squeezed tightly shut. Her eyelashes were clumped together from tears that hadn’t quite escaped. A fine tremble shook her entire body. When she looked back up at him, her blue orbs burned into him.

“Lucifer, I need you to, to do your thing. On him.” Her jaw was clenched so tight he could see the muscles straining beneath her skin.

“I already asked him what he desires, Detective,” he said, voice soft and gentle. “He’s not going to confess, not when his greatest desire is to be free.”

“I’m not asking you to make him confess,” she denied.

“Then what?”

“I want you to put the fear of, of you into that creep. Whatever it was that you did to drive Jimmy Barnes mad, what you did to those others that made them curl up and cry like, like you really are the Devil. Do it to him. He shouldn’t be allowed peace of mind. Not after what he did.”

“Look at you, listening that little me on your shoulder.”

A reluctant smile tugged at her lips. “Will you do it?”

“For you, Detective? Of course. But no peeking.”

She released his hand to hold her fist out, pinky extended. “Promise.”

He laughed and linked his own pinkie with hers, just as young Beatrice had taught him. 

🔥 ✨ 🔥 ✨ 😈✨ 🔥 ✨ 🔥 

Chloe followed Lucifer to the door to the interrogation room. A surge of affection warmed her chest at the dramatic little bow he tossed her way before he sauntered into the room, shutting the door firmly behind himself with an assurance that he wouldn’t touch their prisoner. 

She waited out in the hallway, hand scratching lightly behind Aza’s ears. The dog really was sweet, despite its scary, wolf-like appearance. Though with the way Lucifer encouraged his pets to growl at Dan, Chloe could understand why her ex didn’t agree. She also had to admit that it was a little concerning that Malcolm Graham had actually turned out to be guilty. She didn’t buy for a second that Lucifer’s other hound, Rhan, had somehow sniffed out the culprit.

She still needed to talk to Lucifer about that. And about several other worrying things he’d said over the last week. Hell Beasts had to be code for something. Or a metaphor. Something that played into Lucifer’s Devil thing. She would have let it go, but there’d been a pretty dramatic uptick in disasters recently, and she couldn’t help but think that his warnings about chaos had something to do with it.

That horrible fire in Glendale Peak that had spilled over into Atwater Village, burning straight through nearly four blocks before the fire department was able to put it out. The huge tunnels they’d found under that collapsed apartment building in Pasadena. And Chloe hadn’t forgotten how weird Lucifer had acted about going to Boyle Heights right before all those half-eaten homeless people had turned up near there. 

Whatever was going on, the police needed to know about it. Which meant it fell to her, since Lucifer would never open up to anyone else. 

The door jerked open with a rusty squeal, framing Lucifer in a halo of florescent light like a silver-screen mob boss. Chloe peeked around him to get a look at their murderer, and a surge of vicious pleasure boiled through her veins at the sight of the tear-stained, blubbering mess Iosif had become after a mere thirty seconds with her partner. 

The Russian started begging in broken English as soon as he caught sight of her, a confession falling from his lips in a desperate tenor. Where he’d buried the murder weapon and his bloody clothes, the pictures he’d taken, all of it choked out without prompting while Lucifer stood serenely at her back. 

Lucifer got a text from Maze as an officer came to take Iosif back to his cell, a signed confession ensuring he’d never see the light of day again. Chloe was sure the scumbag would regret waving his right to lawyer later; she could be nothing but thrilled with the way it had panned out.

But Lucifer’s muttered, “That was fast,” and the way he strode out of the precinct with rushed excuses mirrored his behavior in Boyle Heights too closely for comfort. The way Aza howled, a bloodthirsty, eager sound, and loped out the door ahead of him brought to mind images of mythical ‘Wild Hunts’ and half-eaten bodies, sending a sharp chill down her spine. She was confident Lucifer wouldn’t hurt anyone, but still… 

Chloe grabbed her keys and peeled out of the parking lot on his heels, ruthlessly suppressing the stab of guilt she felt at tailing her best friend.


	8. Revelations

Chloe knew Lucifer didn’t pay attention to things like tails when he was driving, but the way he whipped around corners and sped through lights right as they were about the turn red just to break into a masterful game of dodging and weaving between lanes would have made the most paranoid of spies proud, and Chloe was hard pressed to keep up. Fortunately for her, she was able to track him with the ‘Find My Friends’ app on her phone, so twenty minutes after she had inevitably lost him, she pulled into an abandoned school parking lot to find Lucifer’s classic corvette settled next to a souped-up truck, two dependable looking hybrid Lexus SUV’s, one each in gold and silver, and a sky blue VW Beetle with a pair of crystal angel wings hanging from the rearview mirror.

She parked on the other side of the lot around a corner where her car would be concealed by the red brick of the school building, and hopped out to make her way slowly indoors. 

It took her longer than it should have to figure out what was causing the pit of apprehension knotting her gut: the world around her was completely silent. All the normal little sounds of life that she never paid any attention to, the rumbling of cars and the buzzing of bugs that usually accompanied the setting sun, were absent. Even the soft hum of electricity that was human kind’s constant companion in all large cities was gone. 

A lone drop of sweat trickled down her spine as her rubber-soled shoes crunched gently against the concrete pathway. Almost compulsively she found herself counting her steps, fifty-three to reach the large wood-paneled door. She yanked it open, cringing at the loud creak it made as it swung on thick metal hinges, and walked inside. 

Years on the police force had taught Chloe to listen to her instincts, so ridiculous as she felt for doing so, she unholstered her gun and moved into a ready position against the wall, methodically clearing each empty classroom as she paced forward. 

She was beginning to hear noises in the distance. A basketball game, maybe a wrestling match. Some kind of sporting event muffled behind layers of walls, but the yelling was becoming more distinctive as the minutes passed.

And then an explosion rocked the foundation of the school, knocking Chloe to her knees in a spray of dust, though luckily all of the walls around her remained intact. She struggled to her feet, disoriented and ready to run back to her car, before she realized with a nauseating swoop that Lucifer might have been caught in the blast. 

“Dammit! I said no smiting, Michael!” Chloe heard his voice ring out as she sprinted through the deserted halls towards the location of the detonation, though she spared no thoughts for her relief. 

“It keeps disintegrating every time I try to stab it!” Another voice retorted. Michael, she guessed. “Into a swarm of locusts! Was that your idea of a joke, Brother?”

“That’s what that one _does_. It’s a million for one deal, lucky you. And no, I’ve told you before that I didn’t make the damned things!” Another explosion rocked the building right as Lucifer finished speaking, and Chloe could hear him shouting again, sounding increasingly frustrated. “I said no smiting! Can’t you ever listen!”

“It was just a little one,” Michael defended himself, and Chloe had a brief flash of insight into what Lucifer’s childhood must have been like. Just a small explosion, like that made blowing things up better. “I just hit a couple of the tiny bug parts. How else am I supposed to fight this beast?”

Seriously, what had Lucifer gotten mixed up in this time? This had to be the weirdest fight dialogue Chloe had ever heard outside of a video game. 

And then she turned the corner into the abandoned cafeteria, and she no longer had to wonder. 

“You could try trapping it instead.” She heard Lucifer say over the general din of the battle raging before her, but his words were like a distant memory, ringing through her mind but failing to seize her attention. Because what she was witnessing right now was impossible. Maze, Lucifer, his pet wolves, and his three brothers, they were all here, fighting against a horde of monsters that would have looked perfectly at home in a sci-fi horror movie, or perhaps on the pages of a book of Greek myths. 

Across the room, Maze and the hounds were engaged with what appeared to be actual zombies. Only the things had no skin. They looked like a human with all of its outer layers peeled back, all exposed muscle and dripping blood as they _crawled_ towards a madly cackling Maze. And what was the woman using to defend herself? Knives. Fucking knives. What the Hell?

Chloe’s eyes darted to a different section of the room where Gabriel and Amenadiel were ganging up on, dear God, were those _chimeras_? Two different heads: one a snarling lion, sharp fangs bared as it tried to rip into its man-shaped opponent; one a narrow-eyed goat, head lowered and ready to ram strong horns into its victim. And yep, there was the venomous snake masquerading as a tail, spitting deadly fire from its maw like it wanted to claim dragon status as well. Chloe wasn’t well-versed in mythology, but she remembered this monster, if for no other reason than because she’d always been impressed with the ridiculous imaginations of the Ancient Greeks for thinking it up.

They didn’t seem so ridiculous now. The monsters were real, and there were five of them. Five giants with fangs, and the two dark-skinned brothers were dancing around them with…Goddammit, hadn’t these idiots ever heard of guns? 

A shout of triumph drew her eyes over to Lucifer’s golden brother. Michael was combatting a literal swarm of locusts with lights. Actual, honest to God, shimmering _rainbow lights_. And even worse, she realized with a kind of stupefied dismay, it was working. The locusts were slowly being forced to mesh back together into some large, misshapen brown lump. With teeth. 

Chloe reached behind her and grabbed onto the wall for support as her legs threatened to give way beneath her. But she kept her gun aloft, pointed fruitlessly at the general chaos. 

“Echidna, my dear!” Lucifer yelled out a mocking greeting loud enough that Chloe heard it clearly even over the dull roar of the chimeras’ fires and the general wailing of the other creatures who were dropping like flies, over even Maze’s haunting laughter and the hounds excited howls. 

Chloe stared as her partner cut through a writhing mass of snakes towards a monster situated atop a raised dais at one end of the room. The platform probably housed the teacher’s table when school was in session, but right now its only occupant was a hundred foot long snake, one with the upper body of a terrifyingly beautiful woman. Flowing chestnut hair framed a lovely face, highlighting big blue eyes and a becoming womanly figured, bared unashamedly to the world. But from the hips down, she wore the body of a huge, speckled snake. 

And, Chloe observed with fascinated horror, she was birthing more monsters in an almost uninterrupted stream. Spiky-skinned snakes surged from her body and straight into the melee attacking Lucifer. A slightly longer pause, and a small chimera emerged, growing at an alarming rate. It would be the same size as the ones battling Amenadiel and Gabriel in less than ten minutes. 

“My Lord,” the so-named Echidna hissed back at Lucifer, tone equally as mocking as Lucifer’s had been. “I knew you would come for me. And here you are. I would apologize for the reception; children can be so unruly; but boys will be boys. And I will be honest, watching them rip into you and your brethren has been a delight.”

“I’m sure,” Lucifer agreed dryly. He continued slicing his way forward as he spoke with a kind of skill Chloe would never have expected from him. She’d always known he was strong and graceful in the way one associated with highly trained dancers, but she hadn’t realized he could move like this, that his fighting could be honed into this pure efficiency of motion. Not a single step or jab of his weapon was wasted. He moved like he was born to the sword, like he’d been wielding it for a thousand years. 

And God, but he probably had been, she thought, her breaths starting to come in labored pants, little dark spots dancing in her vision. Because the snake lady had just called him _My Lord_. Because all of this was impossible. Should be impossible. But she knew it was real, could see it with her own two eyes. And she couldn’t write this off as some weird hypnosis trick. She couldn’t pretend blood loss was making her misremember things, not like when she’d been shot by Jimmy Barnes during the first case she’d worked with Lucifer. She couldn’t say this was a trick of the light or laugh about the idea that Lucifer might be a secret body builder in his spare time. 

Chloe couldn’t deny that this was all real. And if this was real, then everything Lucifer had ever told her was true. It was all true. He was the Devil. The actual Devil. And Michael and Gabriel were honest to God archangels. Amenadiel was an angel. Sweet Jesus, she was surrounded by them. And Maze. The _hellhounds_. Fucking Hell, she thought with a hysterical giggle. 

She slid down the wall, gun still held limply before her, and tried to fight back the panic that wanted to swallow her up like a living thing. Somewhere buried deep in her subconscious she was grateful that none of the literal monsters in the room seemed to have noticed her, too preoccupied with the supernatural people Chloe had been obliviously calling friends for nearly a year. 

She wondered if it was to her detriment or benefit that she was not well-schooled in theology, that she hadn’t bothered to educate herself even after she started working with a man who claimed to be Satan, because everything her partner had ever said about himself had seemed so contrary to the traditional understanding of the Devil. Because how could this man, this being, be the Prince of Lies? The Deceiver? 

This man who never lies. Because, _oh God_ , it was all true. He really was the Devil. And _God_ …God, he was real too.

Lucifer had reached the dais by now, a path of twitching, grotesque bodies slain in his wake. Echidna reared up from her lazy sprawl, her confident smirk dropping into a vicious snarl as she rose thirty feet in the air, her head bumping against the high, vaulted ceiling. She said something that Chloe didn’t catch, and a blob of molten lava dripped from her birthing canal to coil at the ground right in front of Lucifer.

Nine heads sprouted from a long, thick body with short legs and a powerful tail, like a Komodo dragon made of fire and extra deadly jaws. The thing lunged, and Chloe cried out in alarm, sure that a sword was no match for a twenty foot long lizard despite all evidence to the contrary. She was on her knees, trying to struggle to her feet so she could run to Lucifer’s aid, and he was…laughing.

He reached out, not with his sword which had cut down so many monsters already, but with his bare hand. His fingers wrapped around one of the thick, muscular necks, and blackness spread rapidly across the creature’s body until there was no red left; then the great lizard crumbled to ash, like the logs in a bonfire after they’d been dowsed with water. 

Lucifer lifted his hand up to show a small orb of fire which he played with for several seconds like a magician with a quarter. “Fire? Really? How stupid are you, Echidna?”

A flick of his wrist and that small ball of fire burst into a blazing inferno. Echidna shrieked in agony as the flames wrapped around her body in a burning whip, dragging her down towards their master so he could plunge his black blade straight through her abdomen, ensuring no more monstrous babies would emerge. 

Chloe could smell the burning flesh from all the way across the room. It reminded her horrifyingly of a hamburger on a grill. She dropped from her knees to all fours and wretched, then shuffled backwards to curl up in a tucked away corner, hidden from the room by one of the last remaining intact cafeteria tables. 

She didn’t see anything else after that, barely even registered the fact that the fighting had stopped, the din of battle quieted in favor of relaxed conversation. 

He’s the Devil. He never lied. The words repeated over and over in her head, the soundtrack accompanying the image of Echidna burning in her mind. He’s the Devil, Lucifer lifts up a hand filled with flame. He never lied, a flick of his wrist and the snake lady burns. And repeat. 

“Um, Lucifer? Isn’t that your detective?” Blue eyes set in a swarthy, handsome face: Gabriel. Gabriel, the…archangel. 

But his detective? Had she sold her soul to the Devil? Was that a real thing? Was it possible to trade your soul by accident? Or maybe she’d agreed, thinking it was all a joke. She didn’t know. She’d been too stupid to ask. Too stupid to believe. 

“Detective?” Lucifer was suddenly there, crouched before her. 

Instinct had her raising her gun, though her hands trembled so badly she probably couldn’t hit him even at this short range of five feet. “D-don’t! S-stay back!”

“Okay, alright,” Lucifer immediately agreed, voice calm and lulling in a way Chloe rarely heard from him. “I won’t come any closer. You’re safe, Detective. I promise, no one’s going to hurt you.”

“W-what w-w-were? You, you’re you. You’re the Devil! Oh God, it’s all r-real. It’s all real. You’re the Devil. You’re, you’re. And those were?” she continued to babble, tears spilling down her cheeks as her throat started to close over her words, the gun still shaking in her hands. 

“Hey, hey now,” Lucifer soothed. “You’re alright; just breathe, Detective. Deep breaths, in and out, just like that. Good, that’s good. You’re okay.”

“Okay, okay,” Chloe nodded, calming down slightly. But then Lucifer smiled a little and rocked forward on his toes, and she jerked back, banging her elbows against the wall. 

He paused, hands coming up in a placating gesture. “I’m not going to hurt you Chloe,” he said, tone as serious as she’d ever heard it as he stared at her intently. There was something infinitely sad and resigned in his eyes that, somewhere beneath the visceral fear that occupied most of her mind, broke her heart. 

“If you don’t…trust me on that, then you must know that if I’m the Devil,” he clenched his jaw when she flinched, then carried on after a beat of silence, “then Michael and Gabriel are archangels, and Amenadiel’s a seraph. Much as I hate to say it, you don’t think real angels would let the Devil hurt someone, do you? Not right in front of them.” 

“I-I…no?” she said, though it came out more like a question.

“Good. That’s good. And I’ve never hurt you either, have I?” Lucifer coaxed. 

“No,” she answered more firmly this time. “No, you haven’t.”

Lucifer grinned. “You want to lower the gun then, darling?”

Chloe glanced down, surprised to see her firearm still held at the ready. She slowly dropped her hands back to her side. “Would it even work on you? That time I shot you, did you actually…bleed?” 

It didn’t seem possible. He was the freaking Devil. And he’d seemed so honestly shocked when it’d happened, staring at his bloodied hand like being wounded by a gun was a foreign concept. 

“Wait, you shot him?” Gabriel piped up, and when she looked over she could see mirth dancing in his eyes.

“And he bled?” Michael laughed as he threw an arm over Gabriel’s shoulders.

“He told me to!” she protested, blushing.

“Satan, felled by a mortal bullet!” Michael continued to guffaw, and Gabriel smirked beside him. 

“I could have really hurt him,” she glowered at the two archangels, starting to feel indignant on Lucifer’s behalf. She’d shot their brother! With a gun! But her words only made them laugh harder. 

Lucifer glared at his two brothers, then rolled his eyes and turned back to her. “Not to worry, Detective. I was never in any serious danger.”

“But you did get hurt?” she pressed.

“Hmm, yes. Quite the novelty actually,” he grinned. And how was it possible that he looked so much like an excited little boy with a new toy right now?

“So this _would_ work on you?” she asked, waving her gun at him. 

He cocked his head in contemplation. There was something distinctly avian in the sharpness of the gesture. Thinking back, she realized just how inhuman even many of the small things like this that he did were. The way he always circled their suspects, that cat-like air of playing with one’s food. The way he watched people, too long and too intent to be considered polite, and the way he would sometimes open his mouth and breathe deeply, and she would swear he was scenting the air. 

“Do you know, I’m not actually sure,” he finally answered her. 

“You’re not _sure_! How can you not be—”

“Bit of a long story, that,” Lucifer cut her off. “You usually make me vulnerable, but what with recent changes and all I’m not sure…Well, we can test it out later. Not now though!” he rushed to add, eyeing her like he thought she might start firing off any second now. “A little busy at the moment.” He gestured over his shoulder to where Michael and Gabriel had apparently slunk away to to help Amenadiel and Maze tie the monsters up with menacing black shackles. 

An awkward silence fell between them, and in the quiet, Chloe’s anxiety began to churn once again in her gut. “Right, so, you’re the Devil. The actual…Devil,” she said, just for something to say. 

“Yes, I guess this does prove I’ve been telling the truth rather handily.” Lucifer appeared a little too pleased with this result, in Chloe’s opinion, now that he seemed to have decided she wasn’t going to run away screaming. 

“And…you really look like this?” she asked, starting to feel genuinely curious. She was sure her existential panic would come back later once she was alone. But for now, well, you could only be terrified without anything happening for so long before the emotion had to fade. “You don’t have?”

“Horns and a tail?” he smirked. “No, nothing like that. This is my real appearance, more or less.”

Her eyes widened and her heart started beating double-time. Okay, she may have been a tad premature in thinking her fear was gone. “M-more or less?”

“Well I have to keep my more blatantly divine aspects hidden. Can’t be running around with me bloody wings out all the time, can I? Or even worse, my Devil Face.”

“Your Devil Face? So you can look like, like all the stories say you do?”

His expression couldn’t seem to settle between irritation and good-natured humor, instead switching between the two so fast that he looked like he had Tourette’s. It would have been funny any other day. “They took some artistic license with that, but yes, I can.”

She took a deep breath, steeling her nerves, and asked, “Can I see it?”

“No,” he denied her immediately, tone unequivocal. 

“Why not?” She was surprised by how disappointed she was, angry even, that he’d refused her request out of hand. 

Lucifer snorted and pulled out the flask he always kept on his person. He offered it to her after he’d taken several long sips, but when she waved it away, he said, “I’d prefer to keep you out of the asylum, if I could. We wouldn’t want you to end up like Jimmy Barnes.”

She stared at him, then reached out and snatched the flask out of his hand. It was a thoughtless action, one she wouldn’t have hesitated to take a day ago, and she determinedly didn’t allow herself to second-guess it before she tipped the flask back and swallowed down the wonderfully smooth whiskey. “He went insane…because he saw your face?”

“Mmmhmm,” Lucifer confirmed, wicked delight lighting his eyes. 

“It can do that?” she asked, incredulous. 

Lucifer looked back at her, simultaneously self-deprecating and smug, and dryly stated, “It’s very scary.”

Chloe cast a speculative eye over her partner, then looked over at the creepy beasts the other friendly supernatural beings were chaining. “It can’t be worse than those _things_.” She shuddered, then said with implacable resolution, “I can handle it.”

Lucifer shook his head with a fond smile, impressed with how well she was dealing with everything. “It’s not a matter of bravery, Detective. Dear Jimmy wasn’t driven mad because he was a coward or weak-minded, though he was both of those. My Devil Face isn’t just a physical thing: the sight will touch your soul.”

Something about the way he said that sounded ominous, but Chloe was determined. Taking a deep, shaky breath, she insisted, “I’ve seen a lot of horrible things in my time on the force, things I’ll carry with me, in my _soul_ , for the rest of my life. I can handle it.”

“I admire your tenacity, m’dear, but the answer’s still no.”

“But—”

“Trust me Decker, you don’t want to see,” Maze said, sidling up behind the still-kneeling Lucifer to place her hands on his shoulders. “No human can ‘handle it’.” She finished saying, putting air quotes around the final two words.

“But why?” They went quiet, exchanging a look Chloe couldn’t interpret, so she continued, fighting back the clawing desperation that was beginning to shiver down her spine. “Please, I need to understand.”

“Fine, I’ll spell it out for you.” Maze rolled her eyes. “You ever heard that Nietzsche quote about staring too long into the abyss?”

“If you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you. Yeah, I’ve heard it.” Chloe nodded, brows furrowed as she tried to figure out where the demon was going with this. 

“Lucifer’s the abyss,” Maze stated like that closed the subject. 

But Chloe continued to look lost, so Lucifer sighed and added, “Detective…Chloe. My Devil Face, it’s the kind of thing eldritch horrors were templated after. It’s a literal manifestation of soul-burning agony. And if you look at it, that’s exactly what your soul will feel. It’s supposed to be a punishment; so please, trust me when I say you don’t deserve to see it.”

Chloe felt oddly reassured by his words. Or maybe it was the clear proof that he didn’t want to hurt her that made her feel safe. “I…okay. I’m sorry for pushing.”

“Not a problem, Detective,” he smiled. 

“And your wings, you said you had those too, right? Would they also drive me mad if I saw them?”

“Well, not in the same way,” he hedged, and Maze snickered beside him.

“What do you mean? What would happen if I saw them?” she asked, glancing back and forth between her two smirking friends. 

“Rapture, obsession,” Maze started ticking reactions off on her fingers. “Spontaneous need to drop to your knees and worship their beauty till your dying day.” 

“Some mortals can recover from seeing them,” Lucifer cut in, side-eyeing Maze. 

“So seeing them doesn’t…hurt the soul like seeing your Devil Face would?”

He chuckled, mischief dancing in his eyes. “No, seeing them touches the soul in a very _different_ way.”

“Rapture,” Maze fake-coughed, and Chloe’s face blushed red with understanding. 

“Must you always make things sound dirty, Brother?” Michael asked, walking over from where he and Gabriel had been pretending to help Amenadiel double-check the restraints. 

“Wanted me to go with the drug analogy, didn’t you?” He rushed to continue before Michael could deny it. “Fine, then. Our wings are like drugs: They’d give you a better high than you could possibly imagine, and then they’d go away, and it would be the crash to end all crashes.”

“Joy,” Michael corrected, glaring at Lucifer. “They’d fill you with joy and perfect love. It is…depressing to have that happiness disappear when the wings are no longer in sight.”

“You’re a killjoy,” Lucifer muttered.

Chloe watched them lobby insults back and forth, incredulous that these angels could stand before her acting like a pair of teenage boys. And God, they really were angels, weren’t they? What the actual Hell. 

Dammit…Shit, she really needed to reevaluate her choice of expletives.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This note is a bit of a rant and has no real bearing on the story’s progression, so feel free to ignore and skip it. But here’s my take on the whole angel wings/Devil face thing: 
> 
> In the majority of the fics I’ve read (and even in the show, to some extent…wish they had better internal consistency on this point), these divine aspects are treated as if the only reason they have such a profound effect on people is because they are shocking. But that really doesn’t mesh with Amenadiel’s concern over humanity not being able to handle proof of divinity or Jimmy Barnes’ madness or phrases like: “A lifelong atheist, you took one peek at the wings and something changed in you. The great white light was revealed and a believer was born!” And it especially doesn’t explain why complete strangers, people who have not heard Lucifer running around shouting about his identity as the Devil, would immediately jump to the conclusion that he (and his wings) are divine. 
> 
> If the wings were just an absurdly beautiful pair of giant white wings, I don’t believe they would definitively prove Lucifer was telling the truth (or convert an atheist who had never even seen them attached to a person), not even if they glowed or something along those lines. If they were just strange and beautiful, I’d personally be more inclined to believe that some huge, as yet undiscovered (and probably also flightless, because bigger is not better when it comes to flying ability in the animal kingdom) bird species had been found in the Amazon. Or that humanoid creatures with wings existed in well-hidden societies, and that our conception of angels came from rare sightings in the past. I might even (as an extreme long shot) consider that the wings came from aliens. Point being that there are plenty of non-divine explanations out there.
> 
> And the same goes for the Devil face. If it was just scary and shocking, then sure, there would be a lot of people who would think demon or Devil when they saw it and believe (and be scared). But there would be plenty of other people whose first thoughts would jump to X-men or hypnosis or a magician pulling off an especially good trick. But time and time again, Lucifer’s Devil face drops hardened criminals (who surely can’t all be religious and/or superstitious) into blubbering heaps of terror begging for forgiveness. One guy literally threw himself off a building to certain death rather than let Lucifer take one step closer after he saw the face. There has to be more to it than just being scary and ugly. As such, while I’ve enjoyed plenty of good fics where humans do so, it is sort of a pet peeve of mine (within this fandom) when they are able to just brush the sight off. Not saying they shouldn’t be able to recover, but I think there should be some legitimate trauma involved. 
> 
> Anyways, sorry for the rant.


	9. Aftermath

A part of her, a very large part if she was honest, was screaming at Chloe to run. Sprint back to her car, grab her daughter, and get the hell outta Dodge. But that would be stupid. It was just her lizard brain speaking, and right now she needed every bit of human cunning and forethought millennia of evolution had granted her. (She wasn’t giving up on evolution until told otherwise, thank you very much). 

There was a chance Lucifer was every inch the person he’d always represented himself as to her, in which case running would only hurt someone she cared for deeply. On the opposite extreme, she couldn’t help but think that you should never run from a predator. You run, and you incite their prey drive, give them something to chase. She needed to be the fearless kitten that stared down the pitbull and convinced it not to attack through sheer bloody moxie.

Most likely though, Lucifer’s true nature laid somewhere between her affable, over-sexed partner and the apex predator he’d just proven himself to be. Him and the rest of his entourage, because as much as Christian lore painted Satan and his demonic cohorts as the ones to be scared of, she couldn’t claim that the holy angels put her at ease either, not with everything she’d just seen.

So when Maze, who Chloe now knew to be an actual demon, reached out a hand to help Chloe to her feet, rolling her dark eyes at Michael and Lucifer as they continued to bicker back and forth, Chloe forced herself not to flinch away, to instead wrap her own fingers around the knife-happy woman’s and allow herself to be effortlessly hauled to her feet. 

Superhuman strength, the detective thought, adding it to the mental list of abilities she’d witnessed from these beings. 

An excited yip from across the cafeteria had Chloe looking up to see one of the hellhounds loping towards her. Its fur seemed to float around it like wispy smoke, otherworldly and terrifying, and despite the tongue that lolled out of its mouth in the happy manner of most friendly dogs, she found herself backing away, desperate to escape the massive canine. 

“Aza!” Lucifer called out sharply, cutting off his argument with Michael, something about how Pluto was just an ugly lump of ice and how Michael should stop pouting about humanity’s decision to downgrade its planetary status. How their squabbling had landed on that topic, Chloe didn’t have the energy to care. 

“We’ve talked about this,” he continued to scold his pet. Aza halted her approach and sat down with a whine. Her fur settled down into a normal-looking black coat, and she inched forward a couple inches in Chloe’s direction, dragging her rear across the floor in a ridiculous manner as she stared at Lucifer with big puppy eyes. 

Lucifer glanced over at Chloe, taking in the way she’d retreated back into her corner, and turned back to Aza with a shake of his head. “No, give the Detective some space, girl.”

Aza huffed and hopped forward another inch, a full-body wriggle running from her head down to her tail. 

“I’m sure she’ll be happy to give you lots of pats. Later.”

The hellhound barked.

“Aza! Stop being difficult and go guard the Hell Beasts.” The dog turned away from him with a sniff and practically flounced away, tail sticking straight up in a fashion that more resembled a smug cat than a hunting dog. Lucifer tugged at his shirtsleeves with an exasperated frown, muttering, “Honestly, the nerve.”

Chloe watched the interaction with new eyes. “Can you talk to animals?” she blurted before she could think better of it.

“What?” Lucifer looked back at her with raised brows while Maze clutched her stomach in silent laughter. 

“I…never mind.” She looked away with a blush. 

Lucifer continued to peer at her for several seconds longer before deciding to let the subject drop. “Right then, Detective? I’m going to need you to shut your eyes for a couple of minutes.”

“Why?”

“I’ve got to fly these little beasties back to Hell,” he said, jabbing his finger at the various chained up monsters. Then an impish grin lit his face, the same one that always preceded an inappropriate joke, and she knew exactly what his next words would be before he even started to utter them. “And while you know I’m always up for sex with you darling, I’ve been enjoying our slow seduction _without_ the aid of my wings.”

“Seduction, sure,” she tried to banter back with her usual aplomb and thought she mostly succeeded. She squeezed her eyes shut and waved her hand to signal she was ready. Several seconds later there was a whoosh of displaced air, then several wingbeats, the dragging of chains and a clamor of screeching, then everything went silent as the grave. 

“Can I open my eyes now?” Chloe asked.

“Sure,” Maze answered her. “But maybe turn to face the wall or something. Lucifer will only be a minute.”

Chloe peeked about cautiously, taking in the now mostly empty room, then turned to face the wall, ignoring the pricks of discomfort she felt at giving the others her back. “That seemed like a lot of monsters for Lucifer to fly back by himself?”

“Eh, more trouble than it’s worth to let those three idiots help when he’s got plenty of energy to manage it himself,” Maze said, providing more questions than answers. 

“Um,” Chloe hesitated for only a moment, “why?”

Maze shrugged and started cleaning flecks of dried blood out from beneath her nails with one of her favored curved blades. “There’s always at least one faction of the Horde looking for an excuse to riot.”

“Oh.”

“It’s all good and fun usually, but this isn’t a great time.” Maze looked almost disappointed at that, Chloe observed incredulously. 

Amenadiel chuckled at her expression. “Demons, you could never accuse them of being peace-loving.”

Maze bared her teeth, looking downright pleased by the description, which, actually, was exactly what Chloe would expect from her. 

Another whoosh and suddenly Lucifer’s voice was ringing out behind her. “Mazikeen, make a note, Bael is demanding a vacation once everything’s under control.”

“Ha! Of course he is, the big baby.”

Chloe turned around to see Lucifer smirking at his demon’s response. 

“I’m thinking we drop him in the Nile,” he continued on blithely. “Saltwater crocodiles are aggressive enough for him, don’t you think?” 

“Can we focus, please?” Michael broke in before Maze had a chance to respond, saving Chloe from yet another moment of feeling like she was trapped in the Twilight Zone with a bunch of nutjobs. 

"Fine,” Lucifer scowled, conceding with poor grace. “Aza, Rhan, Zeev! Spread out and make sure we didn’t miss any!”

Chloe looked at him in alarm. “Wait, there might be more of those things?”

Lucifer turned to her with a troubled expression, but it was Gabriel who answered her. “Echidna, the one who kept birthing all the other monsters? She called her children back here when we showed up, but there might still be a few out there, uh…”

“Out there, where?”

“They wouldn’t have gone far,” he tried to reassure her, though his tone only made her more uneasy. “No more than a couple of blocks.”

“And what would they have been doing?” she asked with sinking dread.

The others all exchanged an apprehensive look, then Lucifer stepped forward with his hands held out placatingly, which only racked her anxiety up another couple notches. “Many of the Hell Beasts like the taste, that is to say they hunt, ah…”

“They eat humans,” Maze said bluntly, saving Lucifer from his uncharacteristic stuttering. 

Chloe paled so fast she actually felt dizzy. “What? But y-you’ve caught them all now, right?”

Lucifer grimaced and sent his brothers and Maze away to help the hounds. Then he led her over to one of the few remaining seats, keeping a careful distance after she’d jerked away when he tried to place a hand on her shoulder, and started to explain. It was a good thing, she thought, that she’d temporarily lost the ability to be shocked, otherwise she was sure each new revelation would have overwhelmed her. 

She didn’t know which was worse: his dire proclamations about the remaining Deep Pitters or his half-hearted reassurances about his escaped mother. (All ‘Oh yes, I was worried about that, but turns out, Mum’s a peach. Just, you know, don’t piss off Charlotte Richards if you can avoid it, Detective.’) Because there was a Goddess who somehow never made it into the Bible now too, apparently. And she was possessing a human woman’s dead body. Because why not? 

Chloe was practicing her deep breathing exercises, clinging to her sanity by sheer force of will, when the others returned. 

Gabriel approached them slowly while the other three hung back. His blue eyes scanned her warily, like he was afraid to spook her if he made any sudden move. She wanted to tell him that she was well past the point of no return by now, that he may as well just act normal; she was bound for the mental asylum anyhow. But she held her tongue. 

After an awkward couple of seconds, Gabriel turned his attention to Lucifer. “We got them all, but…” he shook his head, “three block radius, no survivors.”

“None?” Lucifer closed his eyes. It was clearly a rhetorical question, but Gabriel chose to answer him anyways. 

“Every man, woman, child, and pet. I imagine the police will start getting calls soon as more family members come home.”

“Oh, God,” Chloe moaned, tears beginning to drip down her face as she pictured the horrific tragedy this neighborhood had been subjected to. 

“Detective?” Lucifer made to reach for her but pulled his hand back at the last second. “We should get you home. There’s nothing more…We can—”

“No.” Chloe squared her shoulders, steel stiffening her spine. “No, I’m the human here. I’ll deal with this. You all, you need to leave. Get out of here.”

“But—”

“No, we can’t have you tied up in this. The investigation’s going to be… Just, leave. Avoid traffic cameras, if you can. I’ll take care of this.”

“If you think that’s best.” Lucifer stared at her like he was trying to see into her soul. She didn’t let herself wonder if that was a real possibility. 

“I do.”

“Okay,” he finally agreed, then with one last imploring look, he gestured for the others to follow him out the door, and she was alone. 

She waited only a minute before going outside. Across the street she could see a dead dog lying in the front yard of a charming blue bungalow house with a ‘For Sale’ sign in the front yard. Right then, she had her cover story. 

Taking one final, calming breath, she shoved it all down and pulled out her phone to dial dispatch. 

🔥 ✨ 🔥 ✨ 😈✨ 🔥 ✨ 🔥 

Maze drummed on her steering wheel as she drove away from the abandoned school, Nirvana’s ‘Smell’s Like Teen Spirit’ pounding through her speaker system. Seriously, who knew Decker had it in her? It made more sense now how the detective produced that spunky little human Maze had grown so fond of. 

But it was also a little frustrating. Maze had exactly two and a half human friends, and that was only if you were generous and counted Decker as a half. And one of those people was still locked up in her office quaking over seeing a little Hell Fire in Lucifer’s eyes while the half-friend had bucked up to deal with the massacre that Echidna’s brood had left in their wake. 

Maze would never understand what it felt like to have the Devil’s own Hell Fire lick at her soul, seeing as to how she didn’t have a soul, but this still seemed like a big disparity to her. Lucifer claimed he’d only shown Linda the bare minimum level of fire in his eyes, which in the long run should prove less traumatizing than witnessing a full-blown horror movie battle scene with monsters come to life. At least in theory. It’s not like Lucifer had ever tried this before. 

That settled it though, didn’t it? Obviously, she’d been too gentle with Linda, and Lucifer’s dad knew the soft approach had never worked for her in the past. Decker wasn’t allowed to hide from her new reality, and she’d risen to the occasion. Maze needed to give the psychiatrist that same opportunity. 

She grinned, pleased with her conclusion, and jerked her truck across five lanes of traffic to the exit that would take her to Linda’s office, turning the music volume up so she could belt out the lyrics in time with Kurt Cobain’s distinctive, smoky voice. 

“Linda!” She pounded on the doctor’s office door when she arrived, then went quiet, listening. Human ears wouldn’t have picked up the hushed breathing or the tiptoed footsteps through the wall, but Maze knew before the light clack of the deadbolt swinging into place that Linda was present on the other side of the door. “I know you’re in there Linda! I can hear you!” 

Her friend made no response, and Maze sighed. She considered breaking in through the window again, but decided against it for now. Linda certainly wasn’t going to escape that way. Humans shied away from three-story drops, she’d learned. 

“I’m not going away this time! I promise, I can sit out here shouting at your door a lot longer than you can stay in there!”

No response. Maze banged on the door again. “I’ve had a revelation! I’ve realized that I’ve got to push you!”

No response. Maze narrowed her eyes. “If you leave me out here, I’m just going to start sounding crazier and crazier to anyone who might walk by!”

Linda remained stubbornly silent, and Maze released a subvocal growl. “See, I just got done battling a bunch of Hell Beasts…Escaped monsters from Hell? I’m doing you all a service, you know! Fighting them so we can lock them back up in Hell! Which, okay, I’d probably do it anyways. Sort of part of my job description. And my hobby. Whatever, look, this time was…sweeter? Maybe? I don’t know, I thought of you. And Trixie. And…And protecting you? It’s gotta count for something, right?”

A soft thunk sounded in Linda’s office, causing Maze to perk up. Several seconds passed with nothing else happening, but the demon was encouraged to continue talking nonetheless. “Anyways, so we’re fighting these Hell Beasts, and they’ve killed a whole neighborhood of humans. Actually, you’ll probably hear about it on the news soon. Don’t worry, we already caught the monsters! …You’re welcome!”

Still so quiet. Faster breathing though, either fear or excitement. Probably fear. Maze didn’t think Linda was the type of person exhilarated by the idea of deadly battle. It definitely wasn’t arousal. She knew bloodlust would never translate into literal lust for the doctor, more's the pity.

“So, we finish up all the fighting, and you’ll never guess who had the balls to follow Lucifer. Decker! You know? His detective? She—”

The door was suddenly wrenched open, bringing Maze face to face with Linda’s anxious expression. “Is Chloe okay?”

Maze smiled, wide and bright, feeling a warm sense of accomplishment. “Decker’s fine,” she said, brushing past Linda into the office. “That’s what I’ve been trying to say. She saw everything and was stuck there with us, and she was freaking out, right? And then all of a sudden, she just took charge. And I realized, I couldn’t let you hide anymore.”

“What?” Linda skirted around the office, keeping a wide berth until she was back behind her desk, the sturdy piece of furniture serving as a shield for the moment. Maze didn’t let it bother her. She had made it into Linda’s office without having to break anything.

“Yeah, it makes sense now. Coddling you isn’t helping you.”

“Coddling? You think…” Linda rubbed at her forehead. “Chloe’s really okay? And she knows now?”

“Yeah, Decker’s good. And hey, now you have a human buddy who knows everything too.”

Linda’s eyes scanned the demon, looking for any injuries. “And, you’re okay too? You’re not hurt?”

Maze’s smile softened, losing its manic edge. “Yeah. I wanted to check on you again. See if maybe you’d unbroken some?”

“Unbroken?” She released a slightly hysterical laugh. “I don’t know what to think. I still feel…You’re a demon.”

Maze swallowed thickly, her eyes dropping momentarily to her lap before she looked back up resolutely. “I’m still the same person. We both are. And, you can ask me questions. I’m here for you, Linda.”

The doctor closed her eyes and groaned, then gave a faint little nod. “Hell Beasts? L-Lucifer told me a little bit about them back when… Before. But I, are they escaping because he retired?”

“Retired?” Maze snorted inelegantly. “That’s just Lucifer being dramatic. This is a vacation, more of a sabbatical than anything. We’ll go back in a century or three, sooner if Lucifer’s brothers have anything to say about it.” 

“So, he is still king? Aren’t you worried there’ll be some kind of coup in the _centuries_ you’re gone?”

“He’ll _always_ be king, even when sometimes he’d rather not be.” 

“Huh,” Linda muttered, looking a bit nonplussed. “You know, I would’ve thought there’d be more power grabs in Hell. Especially with you not actually being there.”

Maze relaxed back into the sofa cushions, glad her friend seemed more curious and less scared now. Even the scent of her fear smelled largely faded, overpowered as it was by better emotions. Still though, this explanation wasn’t exactly happy, and it tread very near to things that were only Lucifer’s to divulge. 

“When Lucifer fell, he burned,” she said as succinctly as possible. She appeared a bit haunted, an expression Linda never would have thought she’d see gracing Maze’s face. 

“Then he crash-landed in the infernal realm,” she mimed an explosion with her hands, adding in the sound effects for good measure. “And he lit it on fire. That fire’s tied to him, and it’s linked to the fabric of Hell itself. As long as he exists, the fires’ll burn, and as long as they burn, Lucifer will be king”

Then more lightly (if anyone could look lighthearted with that wide of a bloodthirsty grin stretching over their face), Maze finished, saying, “But as for every other position, I guess you could say we invented politics.”

“Oh,” Linda said faintly. “Go…sh, I have so many questions. Like, what are you even doing here? On Earth? Is this the start of the Apocalypse? Are we all going to _die_? Or is it all some great big plan to start World War III? Or are you just here partying? I don’t know! And Hell…Hell that’s big. Heaven, Hell, the afterlife. God!”

“No world-ending plans! Promise!” Maze laughed, cutting off Linda’s rambling. “Come on, let’s grab a drink. You can ask me all about it over alcohol.”

Linda gave her a long, considering look. Then to Maze’s relief, she agreed, grabbing her purse up off her desk. “I could use a drink. Or five.”


	10. Almost Sweet

“Detective! I’m just calling again, in case you need me? Maybe with the Vermont Avenue Massacre? Well at least I’m assuming you’ve been assigned to that. With how many bodies there were, they’ve probably got the whole precinct… Well, anyways, what I meant was, I know this is probably overwhelming for you to have to deal with, and…I’m here for you. So if you need—” 

The tone beeped, signaling the end of his message. Lucifer sighed, taking the phone away from his ear. It had been five days since Echidna and the big reveal, and he hadn’t seen the Detective once since she’d sent them away. Nor had she returned a single one of his calls or texts since then.

A couple hours after he’d left her at that school, she’d texted him asking him to stay away from the precinct for a little while while she dealt with the massacre. Then, radio silence. 

“Still tryin’ to call Decker?” Maze strolled out of his bedroom, naked as the day she was born. He let his eyes roam over her for a minute before answering, comforted by the familiar, beautiful sight. All this hunting and battling together had shot his resistance plan straight to, well, Hell. 

They’d caught two more Deep Pitters the night before, luckily before their plans to blow up the Hollywood Bowl amphitheater during a Beyoncé concert and thus launch another war in the Middle East could be enacted. And Maze had look so very tempting as she wrestled with those ice giants, he couldn’t help himself. 

“She’s not answering,” he said, moving to twine his arms around his demon. He nipped at her neck, tugging her closer in eager anticipation of their second round of the morning. 

She pulled him over towards his piano instead and hopped up on the lid so she could wrap her toned legs around his waist. A shadowy reflection of the two of them glimmered up at him from the smooth, lacquered finish of the instrument: the graceful curve of her hips, the gentle wave of her hair, his lips pressed to her shoulder. He groaned at the sight. Music and sex together, Maze always knew how to make a morning enjoyable. 

“Gorgeous,” he breathed against her skin as she arched back, letting him lave more kisses down her front. She stared down at him with half-lidded eyes, a lazy grin lighting her face. 

Not much else was said after that. Last night he’d made her beg (over and over and over again); then she’d flipped the switch on him this morning, letting him wake up tied to the bed. This time was gentler, all sensually rolling hips and softly murmured encouragements as they slowly worked each other towards release. 

They quietly held each other, still propped against the Steinway, for several minutes after they finished, relaxed and content as their breathing gradually returned to normal. 

“I told you,” Maze said as Lucifer pulled his black silk boxers back on, continuing their earlier conversation as if they hadn’t paused for sex. “You need to confront her. Don’t let Decker hide.”

“I already tried stopping by her house. The Detective’s not there. She’s even sent the spawn away.”

Maze slid of the piano and ambled over to the bar, fixing them each an Irish coffee, heavy on the whiskey. Completely failing at looking unconcerned, she handed Lucifer his drink and asked, “Trixie’s gone?” 

“Mmmm,” he nodded, sipping at his coffee with a little moan of appreciation. “According to the Detective’s mother. Had a _fascinating_ conversation with her while I was over there, by the way. But yes, it seems the child will be going with the elder Ms. Decker to New York for a couple of weeks.”

Maze slammed her half-finished mug down on the counter. “Dammit, Lucifer!” 

“Hey! It’s not my fault!”

“Of course it is! You need to—”

“It’s probably for the best, anyways. It’ll keep the little urchin away from the Hell Beasts.”

Maze paused, giving him a narrow-eyed look, then settled back on her barstool. “You still need to talk to Decker.”

“Which I’ve been trying to do.”

“She’s still going in to work, isn’t she?”

“I believe so, but—”

“So go talk to her there.”

“She’s asked me not to go to the precinct,” he said, leaning over the bar, his eyes focussed on the steam rising from his cup. 

Maze shrugged. “I’m only saying, Linda’s doing way better now. She’s even agreed to get drinks during Happy Hour with us both today, which reminder, don’t be late for that. Decker just needs a push.”

“I’ll think about it,” he sighed, then grabbed her hand and started pulling her towards his bathroom. “Come on, let’s get a shower.”

But they only made it a few steps before the elevator dinged, and Michael stepped into the penthouse. Lucifer closed his eyes in exasperation, while the other archangel froze awkwardly at the unexpected sight of Maze’s fully nude form. 

“Stop gawking, Brother,” Lucifer groaned, rubbing at his face.

“He can look,” Maze purred, laughing when Lucifer shoved her in the direction of the bathroom, grumbling at her to bathe without him while he dealt with his brother.

Lucifer turned back to find Michael staring fixedly out the window, jaw clenched like the prude he was. His embarrassment filled the devil with mirth; outwardly though, Lucifer simply rolled his eyes and fixed himself a second Irish coffee, manfully suppressing the urge to further mock the golden archangel. 

But it didn’t take long for Lucifer to wish he hadn’t spared his brother from his jokes, as Michael immediately began making demands for their mother’s return to Hell. He had indulged leaving her on Earth, he said, because he had had more pressing tasks to take care of, and as she was obviously low on energy, it was not a priority. But since they’d secured all of the nuclear launch sites now, Michael insisted it was high time he call for her to be locked back up. 

“If you won’t take her back, Lucifer, I will,” he declared when Lucifer continued to deny him. 

“Because interfering in Hell worked out so well for Amenadiel,” Lucifer bit back, truly exasperated by this point. 

“I’m not Amenadiel, Brother. I’ve visited Hell often enough that I know how it works. I won’t go tearing holes in the realm.”

Lucifer shook his head in disgust. “When will you, when will all of you, get it through your thick heads that _you don’t know Hell_? You drag Mum down there kicking and screaming, and there’s no way you won’t wreck something.”

“The infernal realm’s not that fragile. I can—”

“Mum’s the _Goddess of Creation_! Even weakened, you think she can’t put up a big enough fight to destroy things? It took me _millennia_ to stabilize Hell! Thousands of years of constant revolts, of reality threatening to fall apart at the seems as the fabric of Hell rewrote itself, melding together with my fire. None of you have ever understood _me_ , what makes you think you can understand _my kingdom_?” 

Lucifer paused as he registered his own shouting. With an abortive swipe of his hand, he stalked over to his bar and poured himself out three shots of whiskey, knocking them all back one after another with barely a breath in between. Feeling calmer, he continued, “You can’t bring her back without my help, not to Hell. So if you want her trapped, you’ll have to find somewhere else to put her.”

Michael stared back at him in frustrated silence for several long seconds, the phantom shadow of his hidden wings a rigid, angry line. “Alright fine, I admit it, we need your help. Happy? Now help us, please. We can avoid any more trouble if you’d just…hold Hell steady while we imprison her.” 

“I’m still saying _no_.” 

“Lucifer…”

“And tread carefully, Brother, you don’t want to try it without me.”

“We don’t have a choice!”

“‘Course you do; leave her up here, on Earth.” He offered the suggestion flippantly, but continued more seriously when it looked like Michael would protest. “Look, you go forward without me and you’ll throw things out of balance again. It’s inevitable. And what then? Amenadiel’s screw up released 16 _Deep Pitters_. You really think the mortal realm can afford to have more of them escape? Or what if it’s something worse? What if you open the door for a Horseman? Or a World Serpent? Death and destruction’s all well and good, but I think dear old Dad might have something to say if you cause this world’s complete annihilation. We got lucky with Mum…We won’t be so fortunate a second time.”

“Threats, Lucifer? Are you really going to blackmail me into letting Mum stay?”

“Yes, it looks like I am.”

Michael groaned. “Of course you are…Dammit Luci, it’s Father’s will that Mum be returned to Hell.” 

“You don’t know that,” Lucifer pointed out. “You _don’t_. You told me just yesterday that all he gave you was a vision of Mum’s empty cell. You only think this is what he wants.”

“Seems pretty clear to me.”

“Oh, please,” Lucifer scoffed. “The bastard was as bloody cryptic as ever! You don’t actually know if he was commanding you to re-imprison her or if he wanted you to come down here so you could sit around a campfire singing kumbaya with your long lost mother. You, me, none of us knows what he really wants because he never just tells us anything!”

They both fell silent again while Michael regarded him contemplatively, head cocked in avian curiosity. “Why are you so determined to keep her here, Luci? We can’t force you to keep her locked up. She could be free in Hell if you wished it.”

“I’m not sending her back without me. She’d probably try to take the place over in my absence.”

“Ringing endorsement, that,” he said dryly.

Lucifer chuckled with a conceding little shrug. “I’ll take her back when I go back. She should be happy enough with a wing of the palace, maybe a volcano or two to play with. I’ll get the extra company, and you lot get her off Earth. Everybody wins.”

“Except for the part where you don’t plan to return for centuries yet,” Michael scowled.

“Oh not this again! It’s a vacation, Brother! It’s not going to hurt anyone. Besides, I intend for Mum to live out her punishment first before I go upsetting Hell’s denizens by welcoming her with open arms.”

“Yes, some punishment, walking around free to enjoy all the luxuries of Earth that money can buy.”

“As a _human_ ,” Lucifer pointed out, not even trying to keep the vicious pleasure out of his voice. “Fragile, breakable, _aging_ ,” he said the last word with a shudder of revulsion. “Mother’s going to grow old having to deal with her human family, her human job, and her human body. Imagine her at eighty and needing a walker to get around!”

Michael’s hidden feathers puffed in a poorly suppressed humor and Lucifer knew he’d won, at least for now. He could save his trump card for later then, when Michael inevitably started this argument again. No need to advertise any of Hell’s weaknesses if it could be avoided, and that’s exactly what the Heavenly Host would view Mum’s broken cage as: a weakness.

Having failed at his purpose in showing up here, Michael didn’t remain much longer. Lucifer was just trying to decide if he could still join Maze in the shower or if he should start cooking her breakfast when the demon entered the room, her wet hair darkening her red silk robe with streaks of water. 

“I don’t like her staying here, Lucifer,” she said, making it clear she had heard and understood at least the gist of his argument with Michael. 

He grimaced. Michael wasn’t the only one he could anticipate frequently fighting with about this. “It’s not ideal—”

“Not ideal? She’s a snake!” Maze exclaimed, throwing her hands up in the air as she walked over to the refrigerator to pull out the ingredients for omelettes. 

"She’s my mother,” he said mildly, following Maze’s lead and getting the cutting board and pans set up. As a final touch, he put on an apron which read ‘May I suggest the sausage’ with an arrow pointing straight down. He had another ‘Hell’s Kitchen’ apron, complete with pitchfork, but he only used that one for special occasions, like when he baked edibles. 

Maze snorted and moved to sit across from him on a barstool, her part of the breakfast preparations complete. “And? She’s a manipulative bitch!”

Lucifer pointed his knife at her, but then thought better of any retort he may have offered. “What would you suggest then?”

“Lock her back up!”

“I can’t take her back to Hell, Maze,” he shook his head and started chopping up the tomatoes and onions. “The cage is broken.”

“So fix it!”

“The internal labyrinth is broken,” he grumbled as he began to roughly grate the cheese. 

Maze slumped back, momentarily stymied. “Oh.”

“Yes, oh. It will take us centuries to repair it.”

“Maybe if we pulled extra workers from the training grounds?”

“A full millennia, Maze,” he sighed, turning his back on her as he began to actually cook the omelettes. “That’s how long it took to build the damned thing in the first place.”

“And then your Dad commandeered it to house your mom at the last minute,” she complained, still offended by that particular turn of events all this time later. 

He quirked a small smile. “He always was an opportunistic bastard. Point being, we don’t have time to wait for it to be fixed. We have to deal with Mum now.”

“And your solution’s to go to the opposite extreme?” she arched her scarred eyebrow at him when he glanced at her over his shoulder. “Just let her go free?”

Lucifer shrugged, unconcerned, most of his attention going towards properly flipping Maze’s omelette. “Let her earn back some trust while she’s too weak for a betrayal to do much harm.”

“You think she can’t wait you out a few measly decades?” Maze asked as he slid her food onto a plate and passed it to her. She grinned at the first piping hot taste, completely unbothered by the heat that would have burned anyone else’s mouth. 

“If that’s her plan, then at least we’ll get to watch her stumble through life as a human first.”

The vindictive part of Maze wanted to relish in that image. She knew such a fate would be torture for the formerly all-powerful goddess. But the part of her that was primarily concerned with Lucifer’s safety and wellbeing couldn’t be happy about his decision. 

“Fine, but I’m going to watch her. If she tries anything…”

Lucifer chuckled darkly, his eyes burning red for an instant. “I’d expect nothing less, m’dear.”

🔥 ✨ 🔥 ✨ 😈✨ 🔥 ✨ 🔥

Chloe never thought it would come to this, her being forced to hide evidence in a case. She’d always believed if she was ever put in this kind of situation, she would remain steadfast, refuse to be complicit in a coverup, damn the potential consequences to herself and those she cared about. But the whole ‘The Devil is real’ thing changed everything.

For starters, she knew for a fact that Lucifer and his siblings were innocent, at least with regards to this massacre. But there was no way to catch the real killers. Or better stated, they’d already been caught, just not by humans. And in reality the farther away she could keep her very mortal fellow police officers from those _things_ , the better. 

And then there was Lucifer. What would happen if anyone tried to arrest him? Jailing the Devil, it sounded completely ridiculous even in her head. The problem was, Lucifer, even as she’d understood his character before the whole celestial reveal had gone down, wouldn’t have taken well to being arrested. And if there was any truth to the way the Bible portrayed him?

But he was legitimately in the right this time, no matter what the truth of his past was. She couldn’t very well give credence to Lucifer’s legend without also acknowledging Michael and Gabriel’s. And they’d all been working together. 

So…coverup it was.

She glanced around nervously once more, but she was alone as ever in the viewing room, just her and the traffic surveillance videos. She only had to delete a couple of frames. Most of the scenes that did capture any of the immortals’ cars driving past didn’t show either their license plates or their faces (well except for literally every one that had Lucifer’s corvette, because the flashy idiot clearly hadn’t thought twice about driving to a massive slaughter in an open-air convertible). 

Her hand trembled as she reached out, moving the mouse to highlight small sections of the footage. She was no hacking wiz, but she knew enough to erase surveillance that no one would have cause to examine closely after she was done. The camera appearing to glitch a few times wouldn’t be cause for alarm. It wouldn’t. God, she prayed it wouldn’t.

Literally, she prayed. For perhaps the first time in her life, Chloe begged a higher power to help her out. 

Then with a final, shaky breath, it was done. Deleted. Gone. 

Crap, she couldn’t believe she’d actually done it! Chloe drew in another shaky breath, then another and another, until she was panting, her hands gripped like claws around the edge of the desk. 

The Devil made me do it, Chloe imagined saying to the lieutenant if she were ever found out, a hysterical giggle choking in her throat. Her manic humor was cut short though when she thought of Lucifer’s expression whenever he heard phrases like that, his anger and upset at having the blame for other’s misdeeds foisted off onto him. 

She sucked in more air, focussing on filling her lungs in a slow, steady rhythm, something she’d had far too much practice with over the course of the last few days. 

As she calmed down from her most recent panic attack, she glanced over at her flashing phone. Another call from Lucifer. She guiltily pressed ignore and flipped her cell face-down so she wouldn’t have to see his smiling face looking back at her anymore. 

A knock sounded behind her, and Chloe jerked upright. Quickly hitting play on the videos to make it look like she was in here doing her job, she called for whoever it was to come in. 

Dan slipped into the room with a grim frown painted on his face. She greeted him as warmly as she could manage given the circumstances, but it didn’t change his expression. Instead of saying anything back, he walked over and sat in the seat next to her, turning it towards her so he could lean in close.

“What’s going on, Chloe?” he fairly whispered despite the closed door and seclusion the viewing room granted them. 

Her heart skipped a beat. “What do you mean?”

“Come on, don’t be like that. You know you can trust me.”

“Dan,” she shook her head helplessly, “I don’t, I haven’t—”

“Look, I know the Vermont Avenue Massacre was bad, and with you just happening to find it like that—”

“I did! Just happened to find it, mmhmm,” she rushed to confirm, sounding guilty to her own ears. “I was out looking for a house, and…and…”

“Yeah, look,” he rubbed at the back of his head awkwardly, “I know we see death everyday as part of the job, but look, it’s nothing to be ashamed of.”

“Ashamed?” 

“Yeah, and I get it, ya know? But it’s something we’ve all had to do at some point.”

Her eyes flickered rapidly towards the still playing traffic videos on the screen and back. “That doesn’t make me feel better!” 

“Okay. Alright.” He held his hands up placatingly.

“What made you even think? Why would you even consider that I?”

Dan scoffed. “We’ve been married for ten years, Chloe. Separated or not, you think I can’t tell when something’s eatin’ at you?”

She shuddered, mind briefly flashing to the chewed-up corpses she found after the celestial battle before she forcefully shoved the images back. “Fine, sure, but why would you think that I’d—”

“You sent Trixie away,” Dan cut her off. “Like I said, I get that the massacre was horrible, especially with you finding it unprepared like you did, but no one else is sending their kids to the other side of the country.”

“Well, sure, but what’s that got to do with anything?”

Dan stared at her, mouth hanging slightly open, then burst out saying, “For God’s sake, Chloe! You can admit that you’re not okay, to me if no one else. It’s okay not to be okay sometimes.”

“Dan,” she shook her head, “that’s not—”

“I’ve seen you this last week,” he said, talking over her denial. “You’re distracted, jittery. You’re constantly looking over your shoulder or staring off into space. You flinch at loud noises, and you don’t look like your getting any sleep, and I swear it looked like you were about to have a panic attack at your desk yesterday! And I’m trying to tell you that it’s okay to be shaken up like this. Just, don’t bury you head in the sand about it. There’s nothing wrong with talking to a psychiatrist when you need help. We’ve all been there.”

Chloe blinked, completely derailed. “A psychiatrist? 

“Yeah,” Dan nodded firmly, looking pleased with himself. 

“You think I need to talk about all of… _this_ to one of the precinct’s shrinks?” The idea was ludicrous. The thought alone had that manic hilarity from earlier bubbling back up in her chest, her laughter only held back by the knowledge that such a reaction would only confirm for Dan that she was unhinged. 

“If you don’t feel comfortable with one of them,” he said, blithely unaware of her thoughts, “there are plenty of other psychiatrists out there. Hell, doesn’t Lucifer see some lady like everyday of the week?”

“Uh, yeah, he does,” she stuttered. Therapist to the Devil himself. Chloe wondered if Dr. Martin had any idea, or how accepting she might be of anyone else adopting Lucifer’s ‘metaphors.’

“There, see. He could probably get you in to talk to her anytime you want. And you know she’s got to be good, dealing with a rich nutcase like him.”

“Uhuh,” Chloe agreed, at a bit of a loss for words. 

Dan leaned forward and patted her knee. “Just promise me you’ll at least think about it?”

“Sure,” Chloe lied.

Dan smiled and gave her knee one more reassuring squeeze, then left saying he should let her get back to work. 

Chloe closed her eyes after he shut the door, rubbing her fingers against her temples in an effort to fend off her rising headache. The light from the still-playing surveillance footage flickered on the inside of her eyelids, reminding her again that it was all a lie. 

She groaned, a single tear breaking free to roll over her cheek, and wished desperately that her problems were things she could openly talk to a therapist about without finding herself off the force or committed to a mental institution.


	11. Rabbit Stew

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the wait! It took me a while to get the tone right for this chapter and to figure out which parts of the world building were actually interesting/necessary to keep and which were duds. So, anyways, hope I got it right!

RABBIT. 

Lucifer stared at the quiz result, perplexed. Honestly, how the bloody Hell was this supposed to help him deal with Dr. Linda’s shock over his devilish revelation? The stupid ‘Spirit Animal Personality Quiz’ claimed to reveal a person’s intrinsic personality, the way they perceived the world, whether they were likely to face their problems head on or run and hide, whether they were good communicators or antisocial. All things that could help him shape his conversational approach with the good doctor. 

But a rabbit?

He supposed dear old Dad had given some humans a greater affinity to certain animals. He hadn’t realized that that meant those people had the mindset of those animals, but it made a certain amount of sense, he supposed. What didn’t make sense was the animals this online test seemed to believe were akin to humanity. 

Dogs and cats and horses, he could understand—beasts people regularly interacted with. But he didn’t think his father ever intended humans to develop a particular emotional attachment to _rabbits_. The hoppy little creatures were good in stew or as lining on a nice coat, but when it came to conversation, you’d be better off trying to relate to a pig. (Which maybe wasn’t the best comparison, now that he thought about it. Pig orgasms could last _thirty minutes_ , so even if their conversational topics were restricted mostly to food and sex, at least they focussed on subjects he enjoyed. And boars did have that delightfully demonish tendency to gore people, so… Geese! He had more in common with geese and their tempers and love of flying than he did with rabbits, and geese were _idiots_.) 

He tried taking the quiz again just to be sure.

 _I frequently come up with ideas or solutions out of nowhere_. “Very accurate,” Lucifer muttered, clicking the answer. “Don’t know how Dr. Linda thinks up half of her little theories.” 

_I am always looking for new things to experience_. He’d picked ‘slightly inaccurate’ last time, but maybe he was being too hard on her (pun intended)? Sure she was no Grecian temple prostitute in terms of sheer hedonism, but few people were, and setting the scale for sexual adventurousness by comparison to _his_ experiences was perhaps unrealistic. Really, the minx was one of the more open-minded lovers he’d taken this decade.

“Slightly accurate,” he decided with a firm nod, changing his response from last time. 

RABBIT. Again. Huh. 

“Lucifer!” Mazikeen called out from the bar’s entrance and he looked up to see his demon wildly waving one arm in greeting while she dragged Dr. Linda behind her with her other hand. 

He grinned and waved back, for one brief moment hopeful that Dr. Linda had completely recovered from her bout of hysteria and this quiz would prove unnecessary, but then he locked eyes with the blonde woman and she froze, all prey animal stillness at catching the scent of an apex predator. 

He glanced back down at his phone where the picture of a fluffy, long-eared bunny peered back up at him with big, apprehensive eyes which bore an uncanny resemblance to the wide-eyed look gracing his therapist’s face now. 

Rabbit. Huh. 

Slow, telegraphed gestures then. No making the first move. Rabbits ran when you approached them. 

Maze pushed Dr. Linda into the seat across from him and sat down right next to her, one arm wrapped casually around the back of the human’s chair, caging her. Good, his demon didn’t need to see the quiz results to know about the doctor’s rabbity need to run. 

Lucifer leaned back casually after catching the attention of a waiter and smiled his most benign smile. “Dr. Linda, lovely to see you again!”

She stared back at him without answering, her fingers beginning to tap on the table at a rapid pace, then burst out, “You’re the Devil!” 

Lucifer cast a questioning look at Maze, to which the demon just shrugged. “Well…yes. That is what I’ve been saying since we met.”

“The _actual_ Devil.”

“Yes,” he nodded at her then turned to accept the drinks he’d ordered before his two companions had arrived. He passed Maze her glass of _Angel’s Envy_ bourbon, smiling wryly when she raised her eyebrows in amusement after the first sip, then gave Dr. Linda a martini made the way she always ordered them at Lux. 

She accepted the drink from his hand (a metaphor for accepting his friendship, maybe?), and she wasn’t running away screaming so…success? At the very least, Lucifer didn’t think her brain had melted. Always a plus. 

“So Maze tells me she’s been answering all your questions. Anything you want to ask me? I’m completely at your disposal, my dear.” 

Linda eyed him warily for another couple of seconds, then took a bracing swallow of her martini (read: chugged three quarters of it) and jumped into her interrogation with a kind of reckless abandon that Lucifer couldn’t help but admire. “You’re the Devil.”

“Mmmhmm,” he hummed, sipping at his whiskey. 

“And you’re in L.A. for…a vacation?” 

Lucifer didn’t know why she sounded so incredulous about that fact. He talked about it in at least half of his therapy sessions, and alluded to it in the rest. “City of Angels,” he said instead of voicing his confusion. “Where else would I go?”

“Right. _Right_ , of course,” Dr. Linda nodded a touch spastically and took another couple swallows of her martini. Lucifer waved at the waiter to bring her another. “You’re the King of Hell, and Maze is your…demon…”

“Consort, yes,” he finished her sentence for her with a grin. 

Dr. Linda choked, and Lucifer let his smile dim so it showed less teeth (Had that been too predatory for the rabbit?). Maze roughly patted her on the back several times until the doctor flapped her hand to signal that she was okay. “Consort?” she croaked. “You’re _married_!”

He wrinkled his nose. “Well, we had a hundred-year party to celebrate when I named her Consort. ’Twas a wild time, as you can imagine. Does that count?” He sincerely hoped not. He’d made no vows before his father regarding Maze, but well... _humans_. He locked eyes with Maze and they both shared a half-amused, half-repulsed look at the idea that their mortal friends might consider them bound in _holy matrimony_. 

Dr. Linda didn’t answer, staring down at the table and silently shaking her head instead. “So you’re here, you’re both here, and…wait!” Her head jerked back up like a gopher popping out of a hole. “Who’s ruling Hell for you now? Is there like a prince or princess or… _Do you have kids_?”

Both celestials flinched so hard at that shrill question that they actually spilled their drinks. Frantic, horrified denials were quick to flow from both of their lips as they tried to mop up the mess, Lucifer’s “Honestly! Nephilim were bad enough! Do I look like someone who would be irresponsible enough to father a half-archangel, half-archdemon?” surpassing even Linda’s original question in pitch. 

“Nephilim? Those are real?” Linda inquired, not bothering to acknowledge Lucifer’s ridiculous exclamation, even if his dramatics and complete lack of self-awareness did manage to put her at ease in a way that all his careful body language and soft tones of voice had not. 

“Nasty egos, the lot of them,” Lucifer said.

“Without the power to back their confidence up,” Maze tacked on, adding the most important qualifier (in her opinion) for why an ego was a bad thing.

“Right,” Dr. Linda nodded like everything they were saying made complete sense. Then, deciding it was now or never, she asked Lucifer the question she was really curious about. “So you really are a fallen angel? You’re not actually a demon who rules Hell? You actually used to live in _Heaven_ before you rebelled and…fell?”

Lucifer arched a brow as he took another long sip of his drink. “Honestly, Doctor, have you not been paying attention to anything I’ve said during our sessions?” When her only response to that sarcastic question was a silent blink, he sighed and rolled his eyes. “ _Yes_ , that about sums it up.”

“Did it hurt?” She asked, biting her lip nervously. Maze tensed up next to her but remained quiet.

“What? When I fell from heaven?” Lucifer asked with a suggestive leer, attempting to turn it into a joke. But Dr. Linda just looked back at him stoically, and he felt that odd pressure that always accompanied her silences during their therapy sessions building in his chest. 

He thought about burning up like a comment as he fell, his very nature turned against him, the wound so ingrained on his soul that even after he’d completely healed, he’d still been able to manifest that red, melted husk of eldritch terror as a physical reality on command. And the guilt, humiliation, shame of that loss of control. 

It was a bloody miracle the universe, never mind Earth, was still intact. He had come closer to Com Selh than perhaps any other celestial ever without actually losing his sapience and merging with the universe. And given his nature, well, one only needed to look at Hell to see what a universe based around divine fire was like. Mortal life would have been impossible if his family hadn’t all worked together to prevent his destruction (Yet another thing he couldn’t forgive them for).

“Yes, very much so,” he croaked. 

“What happened? Why…Why were you cast out?” And there was that gentle voice that made him feel like they were alone in her office as he confessed his inner torment from his seat on her couch. But they weren’t in that safe space, and he had no intention of ever speaking too deeply about this period of his life. He was not the rabbit in need of coaxing in this situation, no matter that Dr. Linda didn’t seem to comprehend her own nature. 

“I suppose it’s a story as old as time, Doctor,” he said flippantly, all while Maze continued to hold her silence. “Dad started going into the garage and tinkering with a little project he called humanity. Mum grew cold. Distant. And pretty soon, they were both neglecting their family. I acted out. Dad got pissed and tossed me out of the house. And Mum…Mum did nothing.” And improved relationship or not, that part still stung.

“That…doesn’t sound like the great big rebellion in all the stories,” Dr. Linda prodded. 

“Well, there was that too,” he admitted. 

“Oh,” she squeaked, gulping down the rest of her martini. And they were back to the big rabbit eyes.

“I didn’t win,” he was quick to reassure her. “Obviously.” 

She nodded a little jerkily then asked about the rest of his family, apparently determined to suss out all the hard-hitting questions tonight. Maze had gotten all the easy how-does-Hell-work, how-did-you-torture-Hitler, is-my-Uncle-Edwin-down-there inquiries. Fair or not, though, Lucifer did try to answer her. And if he waxed a little poetic on how Michael’s mind had clearly been affected by his power to make and shape solid matter, well, his brother was a block-headed bastard and deserved every word of censure.

“You sound more fond of your sisters,” Dr. Linda commented after a while. “Protective, even?”

He shot her a deadpan look. “Well, when the competition is _Michael_.”

“Why do you think you feel more protective of your sisters than you do of your brothers?” 

This was starting to feel distinctly like therapy, so of course Lucifer didn’t understand what his shrink was driving at. “Because I like them more?”

He’d always been close with Jophiel, his artsy sister. Jophie had been a bit obsessed with the Romans recently, first with the whole Renaissance deal and then with all the American government buildings, but they had a shared love for beauty in all its forms. And no matter what else was going on in their family, he and Jophie, they’d always had their music. 

And Ariel was responsible for breathing life into this planet he loved so much. Life and Fire, their natures danced so well together it was impossible not to understand one another. Of all his true siblings, his fellow octuplets, she was the one most sympathetic when he’d rebelled. 

As for Azrael, well, she laughed at all his jokes, no matter how dark. It was hard not to like someone who shared your sense of humor.

Compared with his sisters, he had next to nothing in common with his brothers. Michael was stiff, the original uptight military man, which made him a terrific general for the Heavenly Host’s army, but not much fun to hang out with outside of a fight. Uriel was an insufferable know-it-all who never let anyone actually speak, preferring to carry on conversations as if his precious patterns were the end-all, be-all of communication. Raphael was the complete opposite, practically a mime in his sheer determination to speak as little as possible. The healer was at least not aggravating to be around, but he was a bit dull. And then there was Gabriel, Lucifer’s favorite brother. Easygoing and a natural mediator, Lucifer only wished the other archangel would stop trying to please everybody all the time. 

“Hmmm,” Dr. Linda nodded. Her eyes were a little glazed from drink, which made Lucifer wonder if he was imagining the keen intellectual interest in her expression. It could have been confusion or nausea. He wasn’t always the best with reading human emotions. “Are they nicer than your brothers?” she asked. “Ariel seems _especially_ nice. Thank her for…flowers? Yes! For flowers…from me. The thanks should be from me. Because I’m alive.”

Lucifer snorted and shared an amused look with Maze. It seemed the alcohol was finally hitting the good doctor. “Oh please, don’t let her fool you. Ariel has the nastiest temper of any of my siblings.”

“Worse than you?” Dr. Linda sounded dubious. 

“Well…”

“Uh, the Rebellion we just talked about ringing any bells, _My Lord_?” Maze smirked, the honorific rolling off her tongue like sin. 

He shifted in his seat. Dammit, she knew she wasn’t supposed to use his title in places he couldn’t act on it, and he was trying very hard to be good for the doctor (who didn’t want to have sex with him again, poor thing, especially not in public).

“Your temper _is_ literally legendary.” Dr. Linda agreed with all of her typical dry wit, slightly slurred though her words were. 

He scoffed. “You think it’s a coincidence the Sahara formed at the same time the first humanoids appeared on Earth?”

“Wait!” Dr. Linda threw her hands up in a dramatic hold-on gesture, knocking over her glass in the process and spilling the rest of her current martini over the table and the sleeve of Lucifer’s suit, not that she seemed to notice. “She made the _Sahara_ because she was mad about humans being created?”

“I was hardly the only one upset that Dad was ignoring us and arguing with Mum all the time,” he pointed out, dabbing at his soiled cuff. Maze stood up to fetch some better rags from the bar while the other two continued their conversation. “I just…took it a step further.”

She eyed him with concern. “Um, should I be worried? You know, for the sake of my species?”

“What? Oh, no! Nothing to worry about. I’m actually quite fond of humanity now, and everyone else has had plenty of time to get used to you lot. Besides, some thousand years ago Gabriel prophesied Armageddon, and it’s not scheduled for a couple of years yet, so that’s that I suppose.”

“How soon is a couple of years?”

“Not in your lifetime,” he said nonchalantly, then peered closer when her whole body slumped back in relief. “Would it really have made a difference to you?”

“Uh, yeah! I mean, if it was going to happen next year, I definitely wouldn’t be _here_ , doing my job.”

“Even though you now know for a fact that Heaven and Hell exist?”

She shook her head. “That’s... different. It makes death a little less scary, I guess, but it still all seems so distant, like I have plenty of time. But the world ending...”

“What would you be doing instead?” He asked when it became obvious she wasn’t going to continue. 

“I don’t know! Traveling? See the Great Barrier Reef, the Sistine Chapel, maybe go skydiving!”

“Doctor, you’re a mortal,” he stated like he thought it was a fact that had somehow escaped her until this moment. 

“I’m aware,” she said slowly. “What’s your point?”

“Well just that your death is already an inevitability. If you want to do those things, you should do them. Don’t let the fact that you might live a few extra decades hold you back from what you truly desire.”

“Carpe diem?” she smiled, oddly touched by his earnest advice. 

“Yes, exactly,” he nodded firmly. 

“So, Gabriel was the one who made the prophecy?” she asked, changing tracks. “I thought you said Uriel was the one who saw patterns?”

“Uriel’s patterns are more short term. I’ve never seen him accurately predict anything more than a couple of centuries out. Gabriel’s prophecies are inevitabilities.”

“Huh. How far out can he see?”

Lucifer shrugged. “He foretold the exact time and manner of the dinosaur’s extinction event more than a billion years before it happened.”

Linda goggled at the thought. Sitting here sharing a drink during Happy Hour, it was so easy to forget just how powerful Lucifer and his siblings were. He had always come in to her office complaining about things like his brother’s poor taste in alcoholic beverages or his confusion about everyday human interactions, so her brain wanted to slot him in as normal, if still super quirky. Then he said things like _that_ , things that she now knew were _real_ , and she was hit all over again with the enormity of what it meant that he was the actual Devil. 

She decided to back down on the whole celestial bombshell interrogation for the moment, instead asking for funny stories from his past interactions with humans. Human history as told by the Devil had been entertaining before she’d learned it was all real, and it actually proved even more hilarious now she knew every word falling from Lucifer’s lips were not a metaphor. 

Maze, when she waltzed back over with three waiters eager to clean up their spill, proved just as entertaining a storyteller as the Devil, if for different reasons, and Dr. Linda was surprised when she glanced at her phone a while later to realize it was nearly nine o’clock and she’d been mostly relaxed and laughing for several hours. 

“I don’t understand! _Now_ she’s avoiding me? She was doing fine before,” Lucifer complained and knocked back his twelfth whiskey of the hour (which considering they’d been at this bar since five o’clock and he was only just beginning to seem tipsy was saying something).

Linda eyed him as he continued to drink enough alcohol to take down an elephant without flinching. The time for anecdotes had passed, it seemed. “It is a lot to take in,” she tried to caution him.

But he just kept on talking like he hadn’t heard her. “Didn’t seem fazed a bit after the fight with Echidna, did she Maze?”

“She did point her gun at you,” the demon smirked. 

“Oh, the Detective got over that,” Lucifer rolled his eyes. 

“True,” Maze conceded. “She was talking. It didn’t _seem_ like she was about to lock herself in an office for two weeks.” Maze glanced over at Linda, mirth shining in her dark eyes now that the doctor’s reaction was a non-issue. 

“Exactly!” Lucifer exclaimed. “The Detective was completely back to normal. She even ordered me around. All business, unfortunately, but she was clearly fine.”

 _God save me from emotionally stupid angels_ , Linda thought. “Right, we’re all here right now as friends, so as your friend, I’m just going to tell you why Chloe is upset.”

“Yes, thank you, that’s only what I’ve been trying to get you to do for the past _hour_ ,” Lucifer muttered and stared at her expectantly. 

“Alright, look, Chloe didn’t just get proof of divinity, which is already _terrifying_. She was also thrown into it in a life threatening situation with lots of scary monsters.”

“Life threatening’s a bit of a stretch,” Maze interrupted Linda. “She just sat in a corner while we did all the fighting.”

Linda closed her eyes and took a deep, calming breath. “It wouldn’t have felt like that to her, which is the important thing here. And look at how I reacted and all you did was…” She stopped for a moment, swallowing thickly before she managed to continue. “…Glow your eyes at me in a safe place.

Lucifer stared at her with a bemused expression. “Yes, but that was Hell Fire from _me_.” 

“Wait, what’s so special about it being from you? Would it have been different if it was from your dog?”

“Yes, obviously,” he said like it actually was obvious. 

“How?”

“He’s the Devil,” Maze said slowly, not understanding where the confusion is coming from. “The king is the realm?” 

When Linda just continued to stare between them in silence, Lucifer sighed and said, “Oh, just say it’s much more potent.”

Linda thought about those red, glowing eyes staring at her, her mind ripping into itself as her whole being cried out for mercy. _I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry! Please!_ She shied away from the memory, pushing it back into the abyss where it belonged. Mere seconds of contemplation and her heart was already beating double-time; her palms were sweaty and she had to grip her glass hard just to keep her fingers from shaking. It should have made her feel pathetic, but those eyes.

Maze and Lucifer were oblivious to her momentary panic, chatting away about supernatural solutions to their problems instead. 

“Maybe I should ask Azrael to talk to the Detective,” Lucifer suggested

Maze narrowed her eyes contemplatively. “Could be worth a shot.” 

“Um, isn’t she the Angel of Death?” Linda broke in, not sure if she should be worried for Chloe’s safety in the face of that fact.

The two celestials appeared nonplussed by her question. “Yes, I have told you about her before, haven’t I?” Lucifer asked, seeming concerned for _Linda’s_ mental state. 

“You want the _Angel of Death_ to visit Chloe?” Linda pressed on, refusing to feel ridiculous for her anxiety. 

“Assuming she’ll answer, yes,” he shrugged. “And considering Michael and Gabriel have apparently decided my vacation is a great time for them all to drop in on me, _she had better_!” He shouted the last part at the ceiling, which Linda was disconcerted to realize meant he expected someone to actually be _listening_ , and that someone was most likely the Angel of Death. 

Surprisingly, it was Maze who first comprehended why this was upsetting Linda. “We’re not going to kill Decker!” she exclaimed, laughing at the thought. 

Lucifer jerked around, clearly startled by the suggestion. “Certainly not!” 

“Oh. Oh, that’s good,” Linda slumped back, relieved. “Why would you want Azrael to visit her then?”

“Lucifer’s presence draws out people’s desire. Michael’s makes people feel courageous and Gabriel’s makes it impossible to lie,” Maze explained. “Being around Azrael generally soothes grief and encourages acceptance of difficult truths.”

“Comes in handy with the whole collecting dead human’s souls thing,” Lucifer grinned. 

Linda took a few seconds to absorb this, then shook her head. “You want my advice? Don’t throw more supernatural stuff into Chloe’s life before she’s ready. Take it slowly and just keep trying to talk to her.”

Lucifer stared at her, unblinking, before nodding his head in understanding, easily accepting Dr. Linda’s guidance. 

Maze, on the other hand, leapt from her chair, dragging Linda to her feet with her in one smooth motion. “Dancing!” The demon exclaimed. “We’re going to take Decker out dancing!”

“That’s not—” Linda tried to protest.

“Dancing,” Maze stated emphatically, “is good for the soul.”

“Excellent idea, Maze!” Lucifer started to rise with a grin, but was immediately shot down by the demon.

“Not you,” she said. “This is a girl’s night thing. You stay here.”

“But—” Maze glared at him, and the Devil sank back in his seat with a grumble. “Fine, go dancing with the Detective _without me_.” 

Maze looked positively smug as she flashed him a smile and linked her arm with Linda’s, pulling the protecting therapist along on her new, self-appointed mission.


	12. Dancing Is Good For the Soul

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Long chapter this time! Can't believe I originally meant to have everything from both this chapter and last chapter together, but here we are nearly 9K words later😈
> 
> Credit where credit is due: Little bit of dialogue towards the end is borrowed from S.2 Ep.4

Maze stalked into the police precinct for what felt like the hundredth time over the course of a far too short span of time for the demon’s tastes. At this hour the bullpen was almost completely empty. Only one detective other than Decker was even sitting at his desk, and honestly, he looked like the string of empty coffee cups lined up next to his computer was the only thing keeping him awake. 

Decker, on the other hand, seemed completely absorbed by whatever was displayed on her monitor. 

Maze slunk through the shadows so she could sneak up behind Lucifer’s pet detective, hoping she could suss out which case the woman was working on so maybe he could conveniently show up somewhere that was _not_ the precinct, thus circumventing Decker’s request to stay away from the police station. (And Lucifer claimed Maze wasn’t detail oriented. Maybe measured against him, sure, but Hell knew the Devil was anal retentive, so the comparison was patently unfair.) 

Which of course meant that Maze almost immediately had to watch as that plan swirled slowly down the drain thanks to what Decker was actually researching. 

Rolling her eyes, Maze reached down without warning and hauled the detective to her feet like she weighed nothing. “Come on, Decker, get up.”

Maze was almost impressed with how quickly the mortal recovered from her shock. Only one full body flinch and then she went completely lax in Maze’s grip, calm as a cucumber. She didn’t know what Lucifer had been so hesitant about. For all her dedication to boring paperwork, Decker was at heart a woman of action. Avoidance was the _last thing_ she needed. 

Maze always knew Lucifer was a giant enabler. 

“What d’you want, Maze?” Decker asked when the demon released her. Her eyes darted quickly around the room, taking in the late hour and her nearly deserted surroundings, and she rubbed at her face a little too aggressively for Maze to buy the idea that she was tired. That looked like frustration to the demon, which just further proved her point: Decker needed Maze to drag her out of this cheap mimicry of Hell. 

“I’ve got…paperwork. To do. To work on,” Chloe said before Maze could answer her question. In truth, Chloe hadn’t been accomplishing much of anything. Instead, she’d been googling Christian Bible stories and low-key panicking about her new reality. A pretty constant state of being since she’d been confronted with The Truth. 

“We’re going dancing,” Maze informed her, tugging at her hand. 

“What? No. Maze, I just said I had work to do.” She tried to shake the demon off, but Maze tightened her grip and kept walking, lugging Chloe along behind her. 

“No,” Maze drawled. “What you’re doing is being stupid. Tell me you weren’t just googling demon hierarchy and I’ll let you go back to your desk.”

“I wasn’t googling demons,” Chloe immediately claimed, but when Maze just looked at her with a mockingly disbelieving expression, she quickly caved and admitted, “Alright, fine! I was, but that doesn’t mean I have time to go dancing right now.”

“You need to get out of your head, Decker. Quit all this existential panicky bullshit and learn to enjoy your life while you still have it! Nothing’s actually changed just because you got the celestial bombshell dropped on you.”

“It’s not panicky bullshit—”

Maze rolled her eyes. “Yeah, don’t care. We’re going dancing. You’re gonna have fun. Linda can talk you off the ledge. And then once you’re drunk enough, I’m gonna take you back to Lux. Little liquid courage and maybe you can ask some of your questions to someone who’s not a computer.”

Suddenly looking at least a bit more interested, Decker said, “Linda’s going to be there?” at the same moment a pretty forensic tech popped her head out of the lab door and exclaimed, “Dancing? I’m in!”

Maze came up short and blinked at the detective. “Who the Hell is she?”

“Oh, sorry! Hi, I’m Ella!” The so-named Ella introduced herself, reaching forward to wrap Maze in an enthusiastic hug, much to both of the other two females' mutual horror (even if the source of the emotion was entirely different). 

“Right,” Maze drew the word out with narrowed eyes. “Ellen?”

“Ella, actually, but no worries—”

“Uhuh, look Ellen,” Maze shot the peppy woman a fake smile, “this was really supposed to be—”

“The more the merrier!” Chloe interjected loudly, her voice carrying in the empty room. “ _Right, Maze_?”

Maze couldn’t help but grin at Decker’s gumption, easily conceding to the demand. She could see what Lucifer meant about his detective’s little authoritarian streak. “Linda’s waiting in the Uber,” she said, extending her arm in a courtly gesture to proceed. 

“Great!” Ella grinned and linked arms with a grimacing Chloe, and the group headed out.

🔥 ✨ 🔥 ✨ 😈✨ 🔥 ✨ 🔥

A detective, a forensic tech, a psychiatrist and a demon walk into a bar… It sounded like the start of a bad joke, Maze thought.

They were sitting in a booth at one of those western-style dives that was a bit too clean to ever feel truly authentic. It was still a far cry from Lux’s swanky charm though; definitely not what Maze had had in mind when she’d decided to drag these humans out clubbing. But Decker had put her foot down and all but commanded they come to this place, and the other humans had been happy to agree, so Maze had been overruled. 

At least there was dancing, even if it was _line dancing_. Maze wasn’t sure it was possible to slut that up, but get a few more drinks in the mortals and she’d sure as Hell try. For now her companions seemed content to sit around talking and knocking back shots, and Maze figured so long as the conversation remained easy she could heed Linda’s advice and refrain from pushing. 

“So I’m curious,” Chloe piped up, and Maze braced herself for another roundabout question about the divine. The demon didn’t know why the detective was so concerned about hedging around the truth. It wasn’t like that Ellen chick was even remotely likely to take their words literally, but whatever. 

“Does anyone else think it’s weird how Lucifer and his brothers constantly refer to each other as ‘Brother’?” Chloe asked.

“So weird,” Linda agreed, words only slightly slurred for all that she’d been drinking steadily for several hours at this point. Her alcohol tolerance had really improved since she’d been let in on the Celestial Secret™ (or more like since she met Maze). 

The demon watched the three women impersonate the angels for several minutes, their attempts getting progressively worse. Decker’s British accent sounded like some weird mashup of Canadian raising and a Scottish brogue, and Linda broke down giggling every time she tried to affect Lucifer’s signature arrogance. Ella, meanwhile, was just drunk enough to believe her attempts would sound better in Spanish. 

“Angel culture,” Maze said, smirking at the others’ antics. “Monks and nuns had to get it from somewhere, ya know?”

“Man, Lucifer really went all out for his role, didn’t he? Down to the last detail. That’s some dedication,” Ella marveled. 

Maze rolled her eyes. The things some humans came up with.

“So in angel culture, what does it mean?” Linda asked. 

“Hypothetically,” Chloe was quick to tack on. 

Maze answered bluntly, just as she had with every ‘hypothetical’ so far. “It’s a hierarchy thing. Most angels in the highest orders are creations, not born; the archangels are the only ones who’re actually related. So calling someone ‘Brother’ or ‘Sister’ is like an acknowledgement that they consider one another family. It’s, I don’t know, an honorific?”

“Is it a big deal that Lucifer calls Amenadiel ‘Brother’?” Linda asked. 

Maze scoffed. “He’s hardly the only seraphim Lucifer calls ‘Brother.’ Lucifer’s pretty free with the honorific. I’ve even seen him acknowledge a _guardian_ as his sister, and they’re as low down the rung as you get. But,” she hesitated, “Amenadiel is the only one all eight archangels acknowledge.”

“Aside from each other, right?” Chloe asked, trying to nail down these rules of angel etiquette, a task made difficult by the light buzz fogging her brain. 

“Ha! Like they have much of a choice with each other. Refusal’s an offense worthy of starting a war over.”

“Seriously?” Chloe choked out around her coughing fit. 

“You didn’t think Lucifer was the only dramatic one in his family, did you?”

“Well…”

Maze rolled her eyes (again). “They’re all a bunch of overgrown toddlers, Decker, I kid you not. Last time Azrael messed up one of Jophiel’s art shows, the beauty queen got all pissed and refused to call Azrael ‘Sister.’ _Once_. Az tossed her in a black hole in revenge.”

“Whoah! Chloe, dude, it was a good story, but no need to do a spit take! Man, now I’ve got beer on my purse,” Ella grumbled and grabbed several napkins to try and mop up the mess. As she continued cleaning she looked over at Maze and asked, “So you help Lucifer practice his lines? That’s cool. Are you trying out for a part too?”

Maze arched her scarred brow. “No,” she said with no further explanation.

“Just helping him out? That’s really nice of you,” the forensic scientist smiled, ignoring the slight grimace that tightened Maze’s expression at being called ‘nice.’

Linda rushed to change the topic before Maze could dive into a rant about her demonic nature. “So a black hole? Wow! Was that not worth starting a war over?”

Maze shrugged, relaxing back into her seat. “Apparently Jophiel found the whole spaghettification experience inspiring or something. I don’t even know. She invented noodles and gave them as a gift to some hot Chinese chic though, so yay pasta, I guess.”

“Inspiring?” Chloe asked skeptically. “What exactly is Jophiel the archangel of?”

“She’s the beauty of god,” the demon said.

“I’ve seen Lucifer and his brothers,” Ella said, seemingly amused to play along. “If Jophiel’s the one that gets called the beauty, she must be ridiculously hot.”

“If you’re into women who look like Israeli supermodels,” Maze said, her smirk positively lascivious. “I almost seduced her once. The decadence of Rome, ya know?” she offered like that was an explanation real people gave. “Lucifer stopped me though. He was so mad!”

She laughed, lost in her own world. Because the memory of the Devil’s anger over the situation was apparently something to reminisce about. 

Maze refocussed in time to catch Decker and Linda exchanging a _look_ , and figured now was the Linda-talks-Decker-off-the-ledge portion of the night. “Alright Ellen—”

“It’s Ella—”

“Whatever. You said you wanted to dance, let’s dance,” she said and unceremoniously yanked Ella from her chair and pushed her towards the other dancers. 

“Oh, Maze, I’m not really—”

“Cool your jets, Decker. I got you. You and Linda can sit tight and talk about _feelings_ ,” she said with a grimace. “Really not my thing. I’m going to make line dancing sexy again. You can join us when you’re done crying.” 

“Um…” But the demon was gone, marching off with an air of determination that didn’t match up with the silly dosey-doeing taking place on the dance floor. 

Chloe and Linda awkwardly looked at one another for a moment before abruptly relaxing, and as their shoulders drooped and tremulous smiles spread across their faces, Chloe abruptly realized just how constant her tension had been all week.

“So…you know too?” It wasn’t so much a question as an invitation to start talking, but Linda nodded in confirmation anyways. 

“And here we both are.” Chloe raised her brows and sardonically asked, “Did the demon kidnap you for drinks too?”

Linda took a moment to answer that because while it was true that that was how things had more or less gone down last week, Linda had been making good progress learning to let go of her instinctive fear of her divine friends. “Look Chloe, I don’t know what it was like learning about him the way you did—”

“How did you find out?” 

“I asked him to prove it, and he showed me his eyes.” Linda shuddered. Just the thought of that fire made her feel like a rabbit before a wolf. 

Chloe leaned forward eagerly. This was the first time she had been able to openly discuss her new reality with anyone, and the fact that it was another human only served to put her at ease. “His eyes? Is that part of his Devil Face thing?” 

“If it’s not, it sure felt like it.”

Chloe hesitated for a moment, aware of all the ways the other woman could mistake the meaning of her next words. “Lucif—He said that seeing that face drives people insane.” 

“I just saw the eyes for a second,” Linda shook her head harshly, “but I believe it.” 

Chloe laughed humorlessly. “Angels, demons, man-eating monsters…How did we get sucked into this? It’s all so _huge_ , and I’m…we’re just…”

“Normal people? Nothing special?” Linda quirked an equally humorless smile. “It’s a lot to wrap your head around, isn’t it?”

“Yeah,” Chloe huffed wetly, tears gathering in her eyes. “Yeah, it is. What made you decide to trust them?”

Linda was silent for so long Chloe almost thought she wouldn’t answer, but then she sighed and said, “His eyes…I don’t know how to explain it, but I looked into his eyes, and…If he wanted to hurt us, snagging a spot aboard the next space shuttle wouldn’t stop him from catching up to us.” 

“I’ve been investigating murders with him for a year. That’s not how…” Chloe furrowed her brows, though despite her words and expression, she wasn’t really denying Linda’s prediction. 

Linda shrugged her shoulders helplessly. “I don’t know what to tell you about that, but I have less than zero doubts, _negative doubts_ , that he could find me if he really wanted to.”

“And that’s what convinced you to give them a chance?” Chloe asked incredulously. 

Linda had the grace to look a little sheepish and self-deprecating when she answered. “Well knowing _that_ , I figure it’s better to be their friend than not. And Maze was…very insistent,” she tacked on dryly. 

Chloe laughed. “I _want_ to trust them both, you know? They haven’t given me any reason not to. But I…”

“Yeah,” Linda nodded sympathetically. 

“It’s just…He’s the _Devil_.”

“ _Yeah_ ,” Linda nodded more emphatically this time. “I mean I…I _slept_ with the Devil.”

“God, that’s just,” Chloe paused, then grimaced. “Ugh, I’ve got to stop saying that too now! I never even realized how often I took the Lord’s name in vain until…”

They looked at each other, then simultaneously broke down in helpless laughter. 

“What about Maze? Are you okay with her?” Linda asked when they calmed down. 

Chloe frowned. “That’s…different.”

“Is it because we’re in public or something else?”

“No, it’s…She’s a demon.”

Linda pursed her lips, feeling a bit wrong footed by other woman’s response, and Chloe sighed. 

“Sorry, that didn’t come out right. It’s just…a lot of stuff is written about demons, but not about Maze, specifically. But all the stories about Lucifer? They’re about _him_.”

“True, but the legends about demons aren’t any better.”

“I know! I know, okay? I’m explaining this really badly. I’m not even really sure what I’m trying to say. Just…what if the only stories you’d ever heard about humans were about Nazis or Aztec sacrifices?” 

Linda looked like she would actually respond, so Chloe quickly continued, hoping she’d find the right words if she simply kept going. “I get that it’s not logical. For fuck’s sake, Maze called herself his demon consort the other day. Even if there are nice demons out there, of course she’s loyal to him. But…I…She’s always been violent. Like really in-your-face violent. And it makes _sense_ that she’d be a demon.” 

Chloe closed her eyes like she couldn’t believe she’d actually said that. “…Sort of. But Lucifer? He cracks inappropriate sex jokes, and he brings me coffee made just the way I like it, and sometimes he’s sweet and oddly thoughtful; and yes, he can be reckless and angry and callous, but… but still nothing like you’d expect the Devil to be!”

“I know what you mean,” Linda looked back at her, brown eyes bright with understanding. “So you don’t want to meet with him because…he’s too nice?” 

“Sort of.” Chloe rubbed her hands roughly over her face. “Prince of Lies, that’s one of his names. How can I ever trust that I’m not being played. He’s called the freaking _Prince of Lies_. I’m not arrogant enough to believe I could see through a really good _human_ con artist. And he’s had forever to practice—”

Neither woman had noticed Maze quietly slinking up behind them, so they both jumped about a foot in the air when the demon suddenly emphatically said, “Lucifer NEVER lies.”

Chloe grimaced. “So the both of you keep saying. But when everyone knows you as a liar…?” She shook her head. 

“Look, Decker,” Maze leaned forward to place her palms flat on the table on either side of Chloe’s drink. “I won’t _lie_ to you and say Lucifer’s not tricky. He’s better at wordplay than any lawyer you’ll ever meet. But if you can get a straight answer out of him, I promise every word will be the truth.”

“The Devil’s in the details?” Chloe’s lips twisted in an ironic smile. 

“Exactly,” Maze nodded in satisfaction and relaxed back. When Chloe continued to look uncertain, she added, “We’re not different people now. And we’ve never lied about _what_ we are. He… _We_ don’t expect…don’t _want_ you to treat us any different now that you believe us.” 

Chloe glanced at Linda, and upon receiving an encouraging smile from the doctor, offered Maze a small nod. 

Satisfied with this response, Maze gestured back out to the dance floor where Ella was busy marching in step with a few men, and said, “Now, you’ve had time for your therapy session, and I was promised dancing!”

Snickering a little at that assessment, the two blondes followed the demon away from the table, any tension they felt at being close to the infernal being eased by their previous drinking and the cheerful exuberance of the bar’s other patrons. 

It was a fun half hour. Maze somehow managed to make a square dance look as sensual as the salsa while Ella bounced between partners with a big smile that made up for her general lack of rhythm, and the other two couldn’t help but get caught up in the atmosphere. 

So it was a sweaty, smiling Chloe who bumped into a thickly-muscled man as she was trying to get the attention of the bartender. 

“What’re you drinking?” He asked with a friendly smile. 

Chloe stuttered, recognizing the interest in the man’s expression and not entirely sure whether or not she wanted to encourage him. But the allure of a free drink eventually made the decision for her even if she wasn’t remotely interested in him beyond that, so she allowed herself to grin and tell him she wanted a Stella Artois. 

He handed her her drink a minute later, then leaned against the counter in a pose that unobtrusively stretched his shirt across his pecs and told her that he’d noticed her dancing with her friends. 

Chloe hadn’t tried flirting with a stranger in years, minimal attraction or not (and no, Lucifer propositioning her when they first met did _not_ count), which explained why she flushed and released an obnoxious, snorting laugh rather than something approaching normal conversation. And judging by the put-off look on his face, that would have been the end of that had the guy’s apparent girlfriend not chosen that moment to shove her way between them and get in Chloe’s face. 

“What’s your deal?” She demanded. 

“I, uh, was just getting a beer,” Chloe answered, somehow feeling even more awkward now. 

“Well he’s taken, so back off skank!” 

“Okay, whoah, I wasn’t—”

“Hey!” And suddenly Maze was there shoving the redheaded woman back. “Nobody calls my skank a skank!” Maze turned around and blithely informed Chloe, “I’m hurting her.”

A string of curse words and white noise filled Chloe’s mind and she reached out instinctively to hold Maze back before the _literal demon_ was released on the innocent (if rude and aggressive) female. 

“No, Maze, remember: Violence is not the answer. Clearly this woman is experiencing some major trust issues,” Linda chimed in. Then, seemingly out of left field, the doctor turned her sights on the redhead and said, “Or maybe she’s just a raging bitch.”

“Ooooh snap!” Ella exclaimed, looking delighted right up until the jealous girlfriend reared back and punched Chloe straight in the face. Which naturally meant Ella had to tackle the redhead to the ground, leaving Maze to take out the boyfriend, the woman’s two other equally aggressive female friends and the four men who were with them. 

Chloe struggled to her feet and watched with a kind of horrified satisfaction as Maze snapped the legs off one of the barstools and launched herself at her opponents with a grace that belied her inebriated state. She was a ninja against street rats, and it showed in the way she mercilessly beat them back, toying with them just enough that they kept attacking despite their accumulating injuries. 

By comparison, Ella was engaged in what looked like a slap war with the girlfriend, and Linda was curled up under the bar chanting Maze’s name over and over, clapping every time the demon landed a particularly good hit. 

“Hey! LAPD!” Chloe lifted her badge high over her head as she shouted. “Everybody take a breath—!”

One of the female friends tackled her to the ground. 

Chloe rolled with the hit. She was drunk and her coordination was shot to Hell, but so was the other woman, and Chloe was the one with formal training. She had the brunette pinned to the ground with two solid hits (only one of which actually hit the kidney Chloe was aiming for). 

When she gained her bearings again, the fighting was mostly winding down, bouncers converging on the brawling patrons. Chloe hauled her captive to her feet and shoved her over towards one of the bouncers, flashing her badge at the man to ensure she wouldn’t be subjected to anymore rough treatment, then asked the man to detain the group that had attacked her friends. 

Maze sauntered up to her with a big grin, very clearly thrilled with the way this night had played out, which surprised Chloe not at all. Once Linda and Ella joined them, Chloe walked over to the girlfriend and the other woman who had tackled her and showed them both her badge, letting the severity of the situation sink in for a moment.

“Right, the two of you assaulted a police officer, and the rest of you,” she raised her voice to address the other rabble-rousers, “could all be charged with assault and battery, drunk and disorderly conduct, and a whole slew of other other crimes for this incident. Now, since I’m off duty right now and you just got your asses handed to you by a literal demon—”

Maze smirked and gave the group a jaunty wave, her lips widening into a full-on grin when every man in the line-up flinched back. 

“—I’m going to let you go tonight. The bartender’s going to call taxis for all of you, and you’re going to go home. That clear?”

She got no response at first, so she repeated the question again louder, and this time they all frantically nodded back. Satisfied, she turned back to her…friends and motioned for them to follow her towards the exit. 

“THAT. WAS. AWESOME!” Ella exclaimed as soon as they were out on the street, looking at Maze with awed eyes. “The way you were all WHAM, BAM, THANK YOU MAM, and they just dropped like flies!”

Maze’s expression was all wicked delight. “I’m awesome,” she said with the air of someone agreeing with an obvious but still pleasing statement. 

Chloe watched as the demon sashayed down the sidewalk, glorying in this minor bit of chaos, and suddenly she knew exactly what had prompted Linda to continue associating with Hell’s most powerful residents outside of her professed desire to stay on their good side. “Hey, Maze?”

The demon turned to look at her curiously. 

“Tell Lucifer I’ll see him at Lux in the morning,” Chloe said. “Just as soon as I sleep off all this alcohol.”

Maze laughed and clapped Chloe on her shoulder. “You’re alright, Decker. And I told him this would work! You know why?”

“Because you’re awesome?” Linda asked dryly.

“Exactly!” Maze nodded firmly. “Because I’m _awesome_!”

🔥 ✨ 🔥 ✨ 😈✨ 🔥 ✨ 🔥

Malcolm Graham sat alone in his jail cell, curled up and rocking on the floor. He was squished into a corner. The toilet, an old porcelain thing smelly from decades of use, hugged his left side while the concrete wall was a hard line against his right. With his small, lumpy bed lined up against the other wall, Malcolm had an unobstructed view of his cell bars.

In his hands he held the pentecostal coin Lucifer had granted him, which he flipped over and over in a constant state of motion. They’d let him keep it, this one personal item. They’d let him, no, he’d made them let him keep it; nearly bit the orderly’s hand off when she’d tried to pry it from his fingers. 

It was his coin, his chance at freedom. She couldn’t have it! 

He would be free. Free free free. Free of this place, free of _that_ place. He’d never go back!

No. No no no. He’d have to go back. But just for a moment! Back to dark and burning and hungry, so hungry, and hurts hurts hurts! 

But he had the coin now. He had the coin, and it would be just for a moment, just a second, and then he’d be safe! The coin wouldn’t fail him. It couldn’t!

But he didn’t want to go back, not even for a second. Needed to stay away, stay far far far away. And he could, he could, he just needed to get out of this cell. 

He was so hungry. Always so hungry now. They didn’t feed him here: only crumbs for the mice, sludge for the rats. He didn’t want to starve anymore! No no no. 

He needed to get away! 

A shadow fell over him, and Malcolm looked up, tearing his eyes away from his precious coin. 

There was a man there. He wore mismatched clothes like he’d grabbed the first articles that had caught his eye with no consideration for the effect they’d have when paired together: tight, houndstooth slacks, a purple t-shirt with the words ‘soul-eater’ printed above the image of a freaky-looking smiley face, a red and yellow pinstriped overcoat, and a single long earring in the shape of a cross dangling from his ear. Despite his odd fashion sense, he still managed to exude menace. 

His dusky skin was pale with the taint of death, highlighting the deep shadows under his eyes, and his hair hung in lank tendrils around a face gone gaunt with severe starvation. But it was his eyes that had Malcolm cowering back. Deep black pits with no sclera, the orbs were split with a reptilian pupil that glowed a bright, predatory amber. 

Malcolm whimpered, the scream that so desperately wanted to escape lodged in his throat.

“None of that now poppet.” The thing graced him with a too-wide smile filled with too-sharp teeth. “I’m not here to hurt you.”

“W-w-who are you? What d-d-do you want?” Malcolm managed to gasp out even as his entire body started to shake uncontrollably. 

The humanoid creature leaned closer, its face nearly pressed against the cell bars. “I am called Jabez,” it said, voice a hypnotic drawl. “And I have a proposition for you, Malcolm Graham.”


	13. Mama Said

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So it's been a hot second since I last posted. Sorry for the wait! I already had basically the whole next chapter (now ch. 14) written, and originally I was going to use it as the 13th chapter, but this interaction with Lucifer's mom kept insisting it needed to be written and used here, so...
> 
> Hope you all enjoy!

Lucifer sat alone in his penthouse halfheartedly tapping out chords for an old lullaby his mother used to sing to him back when he was young and nothing was broken. She had a beautiful voice, the kind that could move Dad himself to tears. Lucifer thought sometimes that that was what had originally made Him fall in love with Her. God Spoke and reality shifted around him. Goddess Sang. 

And speak of the Devil’s mother, as the goddess trapped in a mortal body stepped out of the elevator, Lucifer let the music taper off. 

“Isn’t Amenadiel supposed to be watching you?” He asked without turning around. 

“I used to sing that to you,” she said softly instead of answering him. 

He swallowed around the sudden lump in his throat. “Not for a long time now.”

“No,” she agreed. “I could…sing for you now? Maybe with you accompanying this time?” She gestured at the piano with a hopeful smile. 

Lucifer stood up and moved behind the bar to fix himself a drink. After a moment’s hesitation, he poured one for his mother as well. “I’d prefer we didn’t,” he finally said as he passed over the glass. 

She glanced away, though not before he caught the flash of hurt in her eyes. “Yes, right, I…this shell’s vocal cords wouldn’t have done that tune justice, I’m sure.” 

It was strange the way he could still read her so well even in this form. No great ruby wings, the merest shadow of her full presence, and he could still parse her emotions like they were back weaving galaxies from stardust and fire instead of here, now, with millennia of anger and silence standing between them. But then maybe that was her intention, let him see enough to empathize. It was hard to tell with his parents.

They were quiet for a long moment before she lifted the tumbler in her hands to her lips and took a sip of her whiskey. “It burns.” She looked at him with big, surprised eyes, then grinned with bright delight, seeing straight to the heart of his bibulousness in a way only Ariel had ever before managed. She placed her fist at the the base of her throat and rubbed lightly. “Right here, like the moment before you ignite a fire.”

He flushed and remained silent, as if admitting aloud that whiskey reminded him of his stars would somehow render that fact even more embarrassing.†

Goddess sighed when he failed to offer any other response and they both finished their drinks without another word. But when Lucifer reached for the bottle to pour them one more round, she gently stopped him with a hand on his arm. “Take a walk with me, Son.”

Lucifer let his eyes drag slowly around his penthouse, then glanced back at his mother and raised his eyebrows, his expression so sarcastic no words were needed to convey his disdain for the idea. 

Goddess gave him a deadpan look back. “Not here,” she said, and an image pressed itself into Lucifer’s mind. “Fly us there.”

He tilted his head in a slight nod. “Very well.”

As he moved to pick her up, she snatched the handle of single malt off the counter. “We’ll need this, too,” she said, drawing a huff of laughter from her son in his first truly unguarded moment of the night, and for just a second the ever-present coil of tension between them relaxed its hold. 

Lucifer winged them quickly away from the city, slow enough not to harm his mother’s mortal body but still far faster than most humans would be comfortable with, and soon they were touching down in the middle of the Mojave Desert. 

Goddess had picked a particularly lovely little outcropping for their midnight stroll, the red sandstone like an ice cream swirl on a warm summer’s day, vanilla and raspberry twirled around one another into delicious peaks on an otherwise flat landscape. Above them stretched the black velvet of the night sky, the canvas of twinkling stars shining all the brighter for the darkened state of the new moon. It didn’t quite compare to the skies of old, what with the abundance of light pollution pervading Earth these days, but it was beautiful nonetheless. 

The two celestials stepped down onto a well-worn path and started walking. They didn’t speak, instead passing the bottle of whiskey back and forth, feeling the alcohol burn as they looked up and remembered a time long past. 

“Why did you want to come out here, Mum?” Lucifer asked when the bottle eventually ran dry. 

She stepped up to an old Joshua tree and ran her fingers along the rough surface of its trunk, taking a moment to appreciate the difficulty inherent in creating such diverse forms of life. It had been a long time since she’d made anything new. Glancing back over her shoulder at him, she said, “You spent forty years with your father’s Israelites as they wandered the wilderness, forty days with your father’s incarnation while he fasted in the Judaean Desert. Is it wrong for me to want forty minutes with you in a place like this too?”

Lucifer stopped walking, a bitter weight dropping to settle in his stomach. “Jealousy, Mum?” 

She turned away and started hiking again. “You’ve always loved deserts, Son. Where else can you see your stars so well?”

Lucifer caught up to her in three long strides and spun her around to face him, his eyes shifting to red as hellfire leaked up from his core. “ _Don’t_ try to manipulate me,” he growled. “I won’t stand for it, Mum.” 

“Manipulate you?” She had the gall to gasp like it was an outrageous suggestion. “I’m your mother! And I’ve _missed you_ , Lucifer.”

“And whose fault is that?”

“I can’t make amends if you won’t let me! I’m trying to be here for you now. Doesn’t that count for something?”

Lucifer shook his head and stepped back so they were no longer touching. “If I won’t let you? Giving up already?” He asked, tone suspiciously monotonous. 

“Of course not!” Goddess snapped. “Stop deliberately misunderstanding me.”

Lucifer paused at that, wondering if that really was what he’d been doing. “What do you want, Mum? What do you _really want_?” He asked, and even to his own ears he sounded tired, almost petulant. It reminded him uncomfortably of the Detective’s spawn whenever she stayed up too late, ornery but determined not to sleep. 

“I want my family back,” Goddess said. And he knew she wasn’t lying, but he was the universe’s foremost expert on fibbing with the truth, and in the deepest recesses of his mind, he acknowledged that he’d come by that talent honestly. 

He didn’t call her out on it though. “That’s a pipe dream,” he muttered instead. 

“I’m out of Hell,” she noted, conveniently glossing over the how of that fact. “I’m spending time with you…and Amenadiel. And Michael and Gabriel are down here too. Four of my boys…It doesn’t seem so farfetched that I could reunite with the rest of my children.” She offered him a tremulous smile that he was almost loathe to disrupt. Almost. 

“My brothers are only on Earth to help with the Hell Beasts and because they want to _lock you back up_.”

“I won you over,” she pointed out, to which Lucifer laughed sardonically. 

“No, you destroyed your cage. I don’t have anywhere else to put you.”

She smirked, openly smug about that particular accomplishment. “Which allowed me the opportunity to reconnect with you.”

Lucifer didn’t have a ready retort, so they both fell silent then. After a minute they resumed walking, their argument seemingly finished. That was always how their disagreements went: in stops and starts, small, incremental steps in a steady march forward. Not at all the way fights with his dad usually played out, with Lucifer yelling and throwing fire while his father stood by, silent and disapproving, until there was nothing left to say. Or on one memorable occasion, until he was forced to react and Lucifer was tossed out of Heaven. 

“The Hell Beasts…?”

“Yes?” Lucifer peered at his mother out of the corner of his eye, but it appeared she’d only brought the things up for idle chit-chat, something to restart the conversation but not something to really concern herself over. 

“Why don’t you smite them?”

“They have a nasty habit of exploding when you do that,” he observed dryly. 

“So?” Goddess shrugged.

“So we’re trying _not_ to destroy California,” he said.

“Or you could go ahead and wipe this area off the face of the Earth and be done with the whole foul business.”

Lucifer rolled his eyes. “Yes, that would certainly be more expedient, wouldn’t it? Except for the part where all of the innocent humans die.”

“Humans die,” she said, callous as usual when it came to mortals.

“Doesn’t mean we have to speed it up for them.”

She sighed. “I’ll never understand what you see in those creatures. They’re filthy, and they excrete things that _smell_.”

“Yes, well, luckily they typically do that part in private,” he said drolly. 

“There’s no privacy when you’re inside one of their bodies!”

Lucifer’s mind automatically twisted those words into a double entendre, and if literally anyone other than his mother had said them, he would have gleefully jumped to point out the innuendo.

“Maybe you’ll learn to appreciate them after you spend sixty or so years stuck in that shell,” he said with a smirk instead, as pleased with himself over his brilliant punishment as his mother had been about breaking her cage. 

“I doubt sixty or so _centuries_ could manage that,” she grumbled. 

"Perhaps some of them will surprise you,” he said lightly. They never ceased to surprise Lucifer. 

Goddess continued to glower. “None of them have before.”

“Had you ever even talked to any of them before this?”

“Of course,” she sniffed. 

“As an equal?”

“Why would I do _that_?”

Lucifer almost laughed at the expression of sheer bewilderment gracing her face even as he fought not to roll his eyes at her stubborn dislike of the species. 

Humans could be cruel and selfish and idiotic, and they generally had an over inflated sense of their importance in the grand scheme of things. But there was such an immediacy to them, a burning zest for life which was heightened by their mortality. They loved and hated, celebrated and mourned and created and explored with their entire being. Even in destruction, perhaps especially then, they were fully present. Lucifer often complained about humanity’s tendency to deny themselves that which they desired, but zealots the world over had demonstrated that even that could be done with great passion. 

And humans changed so rapidly: one decade sworn enemies, the next great allies; their laws constantly in flux, changing from year to year, month to month, sometimes even day to day; their languages shifting into something unrecognizable in a few short centuries. Goddess had always loved experiencing new things, so Dad’s creations or not, she should appreciate humans. Eventually... Hopefully...

“You liked the whiskey, didn’t you?” He asked. 

“I don’t have to speak to them to drink their liquor, Son.”

“No, but you also can’t like it without admitting that humans have some redeeming qualities.”

Goddess arched a brow, unimpressed. “There is nothing they can create that we can’t make better.”

“Of course not…Except maybe that Macallan.” Lucifer tossed the empty bottle with a flamboyant flip of his wrist, catching it gracefully as gravity dragged it back a second later. “ _That_ was a work of _art_. Truly _divine_.”

Goddess shook her head and kept walking, allowing the desert stillness to shroud them in a veil of silence. “Your brother found a lead on one of those vermin you’re chasing,” she said after a minute.

“So that’s why he left you alone?”

“If only.”

“What?”

“He didn’t leave me alone. He dropped me off with this meat-sack’s family,” Goddess complained. 

Lucifer did roll his eyes at that. Of course Amenadiel didn’t wait for Lucifer to set up the monitoring wards before he tossed their mother on the innocent bystanders. Honestly, it was like his brother was deliberately obtuse when it came to all things Lucifer and Hell. Despite the millennia the seraph had spent herding the Devil back down below, Amenadiel didn’t know the first thing about punishment. 

“And so of course you came straight to me.”

Goddess rounded on him. “If I have to associate with those annoying humans to satisfy you, I will,” she snarled. “But as nice and tingly as it feels, there’s only so many times I can shut that husband up with sex before he wants to stop and _talk_ —” 

“Okay, Mother! Can we not—”

“—And those _kids_ and their _incessant_ whining about _gluten_! Can you blame me if I needed to get away after a day of that?”

Lucifer grinned wickedly. Only one day in and she’d already been reduced to this. 

“Did you at least catch which beast Amenadiel located before he flounced off?” 

A wry look was his only response. 

“Or at least what the beast might be planning?” He pressed on anyways. 

Goddess waved her hand distractedly, her attention once more mostly on the stars. “Something about a bigger, badder Great Depression and the stock market crashing. Normal doom and gloom mortal problems. I don’t know. I stopped paying attention when Amenadiel said he was leaving me with the humans.”

“Well, that’s at least one more taken care of then,” Lucifer chirped brightly, valiantly ignoring his frustration at the less than stellar report. 

“Hmmm?” Goddess tore her eyes away from the sky to focus back on her son. “Oh, no. Your brother wasn’t sure if it was just a regular human or not. If it is a Hell Beast, it has a talent for shrouding. Amenadiel’s gone to try his hand at human investigating.” 

She scoffed at the notion, but there was an indulgent softness in her eyes as she thought of her son’s latest diversion. 

“And he thought he could do a better job of that than _the Detective_?” Lucifer growled, positively scandalized at the notion. 

“Off to fetch your pet, then?” Goddess sighed. 

Lucifer’s lips thinned at the derogatory term, but he chose to let it slide. The barest thin sliver of pink was just beginning to paint the horizon, and Maze had said the Detective would come to Lux to speak with him this morning. Perfect timing really, now that he had some nice, world-saving investigative work to offer her as an olive branch. 

He could drop his mum back off at her human house, set up some basic monitoring wards, and be back in his penthouse with time to spare. 

Sometimes, Amenadiel managed to be helpful. Even if those instances were few and far between. And usually unintentional. 

🔥 ✨ 🔥 ✨ 😈✨ 🔥 ✨ 🔥

“That one, Poppet. He’s _perfect_. Such a bright, shining soul.”

Malcolm shivered as that unnaturally cold breath whispered over the nape of his neck. Jabez, unfortunately, had a habit of standing just a little too close, the sharp edges of its nails digging in just a little too hard as it caressed Malcolm’s fragile skin. 

The former detective reached into his pocket to squeeze his Pentecostal coin in a tight, white-knuckled grip, then moved to step towards his target, the sharp blade of the knife held in his other hand glinting in the pre-dawn light. 

Jabez pulled him back. “Make it _sensational_ ,” it purred. “So He can’t possibly miss it.”

“I—” Malcolm swallowed thickly. “You do promise, don’t you? You swear that…that—”

“Shhhh,” Jabez soothed, draping itself over Malcolm’s back and running a rough hand through the man’s short locks. “We had a deal. Don’t tell me you doubt me now? That you want to back out?”

“No!” Malcolm hastened to reassure. “I’m not backing out! I want this, I do! I just…just—”

“Good.” Jabez abruptly released him and shoved him forward. “Then go and fulfill your part before the pretty little dove gets away.”

Malcolm looked up frantically and noticed that the jogger was indeed about to stop stretching. So with a determined nod, he stalked forward. He would do this, and Lucifer would come. 

And when the Devil did, the Beasts would be waiting. And Malcolm would be free.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> †Because I don't buy that the only reason Lucifer obsessively drinks more whiskey than a deprived alcoholic is because he likes the taste. It’s next to impossible for him to get really drunk, yet he still drinks whiskey almost constantly, to the exclusion of every other drink. If it’s just the taste he likes, why are we so convinced that he likes that one taste above all others? Because it’s a human vice? That seems like a weak reason. But if the burn of hard liquor incited a visceral reaction in him, gave him back something he’d been disconnected from for millennia even if just for seconds at a time? I could see how that would drive him to drink constantly, almost dependently. He might have access to all that power, but it has been literal ages since he has gotten to use it to light a star…I imagine he misses that feeling. 
> 
> Or in other words, I put way too much thought into a pretty inconsequential detail.


End file.
